Re: XML files referencing DTDs via HTTP
On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 04:33:24PM -0600, Graham Wilson wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 02:48:46PM -0600, Steve Langasek wrote:
> > On Sun, Nov 30, 2003 at 09:37:41PM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
> > > [Brian May]
> > > > This seems to be an increasing problem lately, do I need to submit a
> > > > seperate bug report for each package???
> > > > Referencing a DTD via HTTP won't work on computers with no Internet
> > > > connection, or require HTTP queries go via a proxy HTTP server.
> > > I believe XML processors are expected to keep a local map of URLs to
> > > local files, to avoid having to fetch the files from the net. having
> > > the URLs in the document is _not_ a bug. It is a design choice in
> > > XML.
> > It is nevertheless a misfeature of scrollkeeper that it spends so much
> > time trying to repeatedly download DTDs from non-functional URLs.
> I believe it is libxml2 that is taking the time, but I do not know why
> it doesn't fail immediately if there is no network connection available.
> /me goes to check
> Hmm... If I don't have an interface up, libxml2 will fail immediately
> when trying to retrieve the DTD. Why is it taking so long for you?
These delays have happened to me repeatedly at package configuration
time on systems that *do* have interfaces up, and which don't require
proxies to reach the Internet. The non-functionality of the URLs was
not a result of my local system configuration; presumably, the sites
that were supposed to be hosting the DTDs were down.
This is just one reason among many why making random network connections
for DTD validation is a bad idea.
--
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer
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