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

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Tue, May 28, 2002 at 03:32:53PM +0800, James Henstridge wrote:
> 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.

  First, sure one can ask libxslt/libxml2 to not fetch anything other the net,
the xsltproc command has an option to disable net access, it's simply based
on providing your own resolution routine for external entities fetching,
it's a matter of cut'n pasting 50 lines from xsltproc.c . I'm pretty sure
I indcated this already to the people working on Yelp.

> 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 

  Depends, that's the point of catalogs, sometimes you really don't
want this to happen, while maintaining your data portable. Having 
   file:///usr/local/share/docbook/xsl/html/docbook.xsl
references in your data is a garanteed way to:
    1/ maintainance nightmares (oh the stylesheets are located/named
       differently on your system ... yes some people use filesystem
       where file:///usr/local/ ... won't work).
    2/ guaranteed flow of bug report on the long term, the fact that
       XML catalogs are not well deployed is a fact, but it will change

 thing about the libfoo.so.12.4.5 resolution, guess what, to avoid crazyness
they are using a catalog, same problem, you just don't want to face this kind
of maintainance on the long term.

> 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 

  Okay, you give the advice, you also promise to handle the long term
maintainance of that, okay ?

> independence by using local paths, but you know it won't make a network 
> request for the file.

  Wrong way to ensure this !!! Really.

> 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).

  No, that's a policy, I won't implement such a policy in the library,
but apps should feel free to do so if they can.

Daniel

-- 
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veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
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