Re: Yelp fails to display DocBook files

["Red Blue" <red_blue hotmail com>]

> From: "Michael M." <nixlists writemoore net>
> To: gnome-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: Yelp fails to display DocBook files
> Date: Sun, 09 Apr 2006 22:36:53 -0700
> >
> I'm getting something similar with Gnome 2.14 in Debian Sid.

Is that amd64 or another arch?

I'm trying to figure out what the commonality is, because quite obviously 
this is not a common problem (I've scoured the net a lot before turning to 
this list and basically there have been only a few similar cases with Mac OS 
X ports and one mention in gnome-vfs-list from 2004, about some path 
variable, which apparently is not in use anymore).

> At first, it displayed only the main menu and any attempt to click on an 
> item produced an error message.  Now most or all of the menu structure 
> seems to be intact, but clicking on an item brings up a raw XML page in my 
> browser.

I got to that point too by just opening one of the XML files with Mozilla. 
The unrendered XML page has the header warning "This XML file does not 
appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree 
is shown below." Now every time I open some DocBook by clicking it from 
Yelp, it comes out like that from Mozilla. If I feed the path to Yelp 
through console ("yelp /foo/bar"), then I get the "There is no default 
action" error.

My understanding is that Yelp should do an XML->HTML conversion using the 
XSLT style sheets from gnome-doc-utils, but this step is not happening for 
either of us, and there apparently are no detailed error messages or logs 
available from Yelp to help in pinpointing where the failure occurs.

I would rather have some Yelp dev to provide troubleshooting steps to at 
least narrow down the problem, instead of digging into debugging Yelp or 
even reading the sources to try to figure out where it could fail. While I 
can read the help fro the XML sources or if need be run them through 
translations to various other formats manually using any of the various 
translation packages provided by Debian, I still think interactive help 
should definitely be one of those Just Work thingies, which should be robust 
against failure, at least by providing clear suggestions on where the f*** 
is the actual problem!

Btw, I've tried reinstalling (with complete config removal) Yelp, 
gnome-doc-utils and even docbook-xml with no avail. I even tried the 2.8.5 
version of Yelp, but it performed the same.