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

[James Henstridge <james daa com au>]

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.

--
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