Re: [xml] more questions on catalogs

[Daniel Veillard <veillard redhat com>]

On Wed, Feb 22, 2006 at 10:24:20AM -0800, Rick Jones wrote:
> >  the master catalog will be  /etc/xml/catalog unless the system software
> > have been installed differently.
>
> how does the system software inform libxml2 that the master catalog is 
> somewhere else - or are all the applcations on the system supposed to start 
> setting environment varibles?

  I can't answer for them. I pushed to have /etc/xml/catalog standardized on
Linux (with difficulties), but I can't really work on others.

> >  yes, that's the default from an upstream point of view.
> > But you should not rely on catalog being present. It's merely an 
> > accelerator
> > or a way to keep instance identical in the case you may not have network
> > access.
> >  IMHO if you fully care about portability to any target OS then don't
> > assume a catalog and build the paths in your software.
>
> I think I'm about to fall into a Catch-22 - the reason I wanted to use 
> catalogs was to deal with the situation where the system running netperf 
> had the netperf DTD in a place other than the system running netserver.

   Hey you can't blame me if other OSes are slow to adopt this. 

> The XML-encapsulated messages sent back and forth between netperf and 
> netserver include the reference to the DTD, using SYSTEM and giving some 
> canonical place such as http://www.netperf.org/netperf_docs.dtd/1.0  that 
> each was going to be able to map, via the catalog, to wherever the user 
> decided to install netperf and by extension its DTD - at present defaulting 
> to /usr/local/share/netperf

  Using a canonical URL for the System identifier is definitely a good thing.
But portability (of the document) requires a catalog, and portability of the
catalog system is unfortunately not there. I think I did my share to try to
solve this in the area I could have an impact on, but sorry there is nothing
I can do to get changes in HP-UX or Windows !

Daniel

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