Re: Patches from RedHat for GNOME stylesheets.

[Eric Baudais <baudais kkpsi org>]

On Fri, Jan 24, 2003 at 04:43:22PM +0000, Sander Vesik wrote:
>  --- John Fleck <jfleck inkstain net> wrote: > On Thu, 2003-01-23 at 11:01,
> Alexander Kirillov wrote:
> > > > >  
> > > > >  <!-- Importing the Norman Walsh's stylesheet as the basis. -->
> > > > > -<xsl:import
> > > > > href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/1.45/html/chunk.xsl"/>
> > > > > +<xsl:import
> > > > > href="http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/html/chunk.xsl"/>
> > > > >  <!-- see NOTE ABOUT PATHS in README file for details -->
> > > > >  
> > > > 
> > > 
> > >  
> > > 
> > > Our customization layer was based on 1.45, and it didn't work with 1.48
> > > (and probably later) because Norm has changed some template names.  I
> > > didn't follow recent  development - maybe this has been fixed, but we
> > > definitely must test the customization stylesheet  with various versions
> > > of Norm's stylesheets to make sure they work OK before making this
> > > change.  
> > > 
> > 
> > As soon as we do this, we're at risk of a change in the "current"
> > stylesheet breaking our customization. I don't mind bumping up from 1.45
> > once the testing is done, but last time we used "current" problems
> > ensued.
> > 
> 
> The "why don't we just use current instead of specific version" issue has 
> been around for ages. There are two ways really:
> 
> 	* we have one version which we support for any gnome x.y, vendors 
> 	  that want to use another are on their own and we won't fix (or
> 	  even care about) those bugs vebdors create for themselves
> 
> 	* we support current and vendors are on their own on porting any new 
> 	  features and bugfixes if they don't want to move to the new versions

The main reason why we currently only support one version for any
versions of GNOME is because this requires less maintenance for the
stylesheets.  The drawbacks to this approach is we are forced to
distribute an older version of the stylesheets with our Help viewer or
any package which creates the HTML for the docs.

I think Daniel has stated the problem in his previous emails.  When
modifying XSLT templates all templates are essentially "internal."  If
we want to do any serious customization of the NW stylesheets the
"internal" templates will need to be modified.  We need to get a
guarantee from Norm that the template names will not change as well as
their global behavior.  Then we can customize from a stable base and
not worry about the templates changing every version.  Once this is
has been implemented I believe we can re-evaluate the way we
distribute and import the NW stylesheets.

Eric Baudais