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

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

On Mon, May 27, 2002 at 11:20:53PM +0200, Mikael Hallendal wrote:
[...]
> gah, I would appreciate your help very much. But I do think that it's
> kinda weird that libxslt goes out on the net fetching stylesheets
> without notifying the caller about it.
> 
> I am just trying to figure out how to solve this issue (since this is
> probably the single biggest problem in Yelp right now).

Mikael,

Here's what I have jotted down in my "how to sanity check a GNOME 2
setup" folder (and before anybody asks, yes I am putting it in a
document and yes I will put it in CVS when it's done). These are things
that can be done from a shell script, so you can probably modify as
appropriate for inside Yelp.

(1) Run 'xmlcatalog /etc/xml/catalog \
    "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd"; '. If
    this command has an exit status of 0 (and, potentially, check also
    that the output starts with 'file://') then the DocBook-XML DTD is
    in place on the user's system.

(2) Run 'xmlcatalog /etc/xml/catalog \
    "http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/1.48/html/docbook.xsl";'.
    Again, check the exit status and output (it will return an exit code
    of 4 if there is no relevant SYSTEM entry). If this step works also,
    then everything should be fine. Otherwise, proceed to next step..

(3) Try the same check, but for
"http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/current/html/docbook.xsl";
and also replacing 'current' with 1.47, 1.49 and 1.50. There are a few
stylesheets around those versions that can be used interchangably (Norm
Walsh's ChangeLog notes seem to indicate only cosmetic changes and bug
fixes -- nothing that will stop Sander's customisations working, by the
look of it). If you can match one of these "near misses", I think it is
ok to advise the user to run (or get their sysadmin to run):

xmlcatalog --noout --ad "rewriteSystem" \
	"http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/1.48"; \
	"file://$BLAH" /etc/xml/catalog

xmlcatalog --noout --ad "rewriteURI" \
	"http://docbook.sourceforge.net/release/xsl/1.48"; \
	"file://$BLAH" /etc/xml/catalog

(Here $BLAH should be the file returned in step (3)).

At this point, all should work well.

If you don't want to recommend a change to /etc/xml/catalog, another
solution is to get the user to copy /etc/xml/catalog to
$HOME/.xmlcatalog, run the above two commands on $HOME/.xmlcatalog and
then have the user export XML_CATALOG_FILES=$HOME/.xmlcatalog.

Finally, if you really want to go to town checking if the system will
work, you need to check that $(datadir)/sgml/docbook contains a
gnome-customization-0.1 directory and a yelp directory and that these
contain some .xsl files. There is some excitement to be had here because
you probably need GNOME_SYSTEM_DATADIR (or whatever it's called) for
gnome-customization-0.1 (libgnome installs it) and GNOME_APP_DATADIR for
Yelp (although I guess I shouldn't tell you know better than me how to
install your own app).

I hope this is of some help.

Cheers,
Malcolm

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