Re: [xml] more questions on catalogs

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 03:40:33PM -0800, Rick Jones wrote:
> I'd like to thank everyone for the help so far on catalogs.  I'm probably 
> just about there in understanding but have come additional questions.
>
> First seems to be bootstrapping.  Somewhere I seem to recall seeing (but 
> not at http://www.xmlsoft.org/catalog.html - if my recollection is correct 
> that may be a good enhancement to that page) that the default place libxml2 
> will search for a catalog is /etc/xml/catalog.

 yes

> However, that does not seem 
> to be created by default by libxml2 installation?

  No, this is a system resource. On a Red Hat/Fedora system it will be created
by the installer as part of the installtion scripts of the packages in the
distribution.

> Using xmlcatalog to manipulate catalog files seems to depend on one knowing 
> where the catalog files are in the first place.

  yes

> It is possible for libxml2 to be built in such a way as to have the default 
> catalog location elsewhere?

  You can hack it, but then you're on your own. I don't support this, 
and /etc/xml should be part of the (Linux) Filesystem Standard, not specific
to libxml2.

> If so, should xml2-config have a way to 
> specify that location?

  I'm against as I don't want to promote different paths on different systems.
 
> It sure would be nice if one could use xmlcatalog without requiring 
> explicit knowledge of where libxml2 will be looking for catalogs.  I would 

  libxml2 will be looking in /etc/xml, because that's where it expects the
Operating System to store the entry point for the catalog. If you don't follow
that, you're creating a divergent way, and I don't want to help doing this,
there is no good reason at an OS level to make things in a different way,
and if it's not at the OS level, then use the environment variable to tell
to search for catalogs somewhere else.

> not that I plan on using the catalog manipulation routines, but it might be 
> nice if their mentions in the catalog.html file were hyperlinks to their 
> descriptions.

  True, I take patches :-) or you can bugzilla.

Daniel

-- 
Daniel Veillard      | Red Hat http://redhat.com/
veillard redhat com  | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit  http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/