Re: Minutes of Gnome 2 release team meeting (late): 2002-05-17



Jens Finke wrote:

On 28 May 2002, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
Heh, if all of this has to be done something is wrong (you also have to care
about the fact that the user might very well have the xmlcatalog file in
his $HOME). So just checking /etc/xml/catalog will not be enough.

Since we _DO_ depend on a specific version of the xsl stylesheets I see
nothing wrong in shipping them with Yelp and _not_ have the user care
about executing all those two commands (which will make absolutely zero
sense to most users).

Instead they will just have a working help system, without having to
bother at all.

At least that is my idea of user friendly. I mean, why should the help
system be the part that the user has to get there hands dirty to set up,
then we are very far from the usability track we are aiming at.

Please do it so. IMO it's the only approach which makes sense in this
whole thread. I've never got a working help on my system so far, but a
helpsystem should just work out of the box regardless of the distribution
the user has installed.
Have you tried installing the docbook DTD and XSLT packages available from the scrollkeeper project webpages? Many people have found them to work quite well. You can download them from here:
   http://scrollkeeper.sourceforge.net/docbook.shtml

They _should_ make it very easy to get a working docbook/xml setup. You could try some of Malcolm's tests after doing the install to verify that they are installed correctly.

In my opinion, if a program says "please include the contents of the stylesheet available at http://...";, I would expect it to do go out onto the internet to fetch it. The XML catalog is simply a cache for XML resources such as DTDs and stylesheets, so that they don't need to be downloaded. If you want to make sure that you only access local files when processing a document, then don't use http:// urls for the resources you use (use file:// ones instead). You lose the system independence by using local paths, but you know it won't make a network request for the file.

Maybe it would be nice if libxml could dynamically build a cache of such resources (download files to somewhere and add pointers to a per user catalog file for them). That would be the other way around the slowdown on broken systems (so that it would only be slow once).

James.

--
Email: james daa com au              | Linux.conf.au 2003 Call for Papers out
WWW:   http://www.daa.com.au/~james/ |   http://conf.linux.org.au/cfp.html




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