the master catalog will be /etc/xml/catalog unless the system software have been installed differently.
how does the system software inform libxml2 that the master catalog is somewhere else - or are all the applcations on the system supposed to start setting environment varibles?
I'm still a little fuzzy on why if libxml2 is expecting /etc/xml and libxml2 is ported to more than just Linux and so more than just the Linux Filesystem Standard, why it would rely on the OS to create /etc/xml, but if indeed, /etc/xml (where would that be under Windows?) is where libxml2 is going to look, and it would take a libxml2 source change for it to look elswhere rather than a configure option, I suppose I can consider /etc/xml an invariant.yes, that's the default from an upstream point of view. But you should not rely on catalog being present. It's merely an accelerator or a way to keep instance identical in the case you may not have network access. IMHO if you fully care about portability to any target OS then don't assume a catalog and build the paths in your software.
I think I'm about to fall into a Catch-22 - the reason I wanted to use catalogs was to deal with the situation where the system running netperf had the netperf DTD in a place other than the system running netserver.
The XML-encapsulated messages sent back and forth between netperf and netserver include the reference to the DTD, using SYSTEM and giving some canonical place such as http://www.netperf.org/netperf_docs.dtd/1.0 that each was going to be able to map, via the catalog, to wherever the user decided to install netperf and by extension its DTD - at present defaulting to /usr/local/share/netperf
A netperf may be running on windows, talking to netservers talking on linux, unix and windows, so I ass-u-me-d I needed something like the invariant of the SYSTEM spec in its cross-platform space (no issues of '/' vs '\' etc) and then the "conversion" to a local filename via the catalog.
But if you say I should be hardcoding paths into the software I'm back to square one aren't I? I can see where I might be able to get by with hardcoding paths if netperf were just a single system application, but it is a multi-system, multi-platform application.
rick