Re: Detecting stylesheets and DTDs

[Dan Mueth <d-mueth uchicago edu>]

On 18 Jan 2002, Alexander Kirillov wrote:

> Once again: we are just asking for disaster - on greater majority of
> distro's,  DTD and stylesheet are not properly registered in xml
> catalog. Yes, of course, this is the packagers' fault - so what? Whoever
> is to blame, the users  will be the victims.  You can't expect all users
> to update their catalogs themselves. For example, I have relatively
> recent distro (Mdk 8.1), I installed libxml2, libxslt, stylesheets, but
> on my machine, I get this:
>
> [shurik localhost shurik]$ xmlcatalog /etc/xml/catalog
> http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/html/chunk.xsl
> No entry for SYSTEM
> http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/html/chunk.xsl
>
> OK, I know how to fix it. But average user does not. And we can't hope
> that an average user will go to DV's web page to read instructions, nor
> do I think he should.
>
> My only suggestion is that we give the user link to updated  DTD and
> stylesheets packages which correclty register in XML catalog, for all
> major distros. If there are no such packages, we - or GNOME packaging
> project - must create them before releasing GNOME 2.0. GNOME is meant to
> be installed by ordinary users, not hackers.

Right.  Let's:

1) Whenever anybody finds out the package versions of docbook-dtd412-xml
and docbook-style-xsl that work for a particular distribution, email this
mailing list with the version number and FTP site where the good versions
can be found.

2) Post this information on a web page.

3) Have the configure scripts link to the web page

4) Have packages (eg. RPMs, debs) require the appropriate versions of
docbook-dtd412-xml and docbook-style-xsl.

5) Make sure that the release notes for GNOME 2.0 and the betas discuss
these dependencies (along with Mozilla and other dependencies of GNOME
2.0).

Anybody want to volunteer to make sure all this happens?

Dan