Re: Debian Touts Integrated SGML Environment/sans SMGL-Tools
>>>>> "|" == Nils Lohner <lohner@typhoon.icd.teradyne.com> writes:
|> I am tempted to consider this mildly offensive. Stephane Bortzmeyer
|> was kind enough to point me towards
|> Debian bug #33561
|> It seems that SGML-Tools-2.0.2 does not only not install with
|> Debian, it reportedly also wrecks installed packages. If I had the
|> time, then I'd look into this, but I don't, so I can't.
I am the other of the press release which is tempting you to take
offense. I'm going to try my best to not come off as defensive here,
so give me the benefit of the doubt.
First off, the release mentioned in the press release is Debian 2.1.
It ships with the older sgml-tools, 1.0.9. Nothing in the press
release I wrote was meant to claim that our system worked flawlessly
with SGMLtools 2.x. Remember, we froze Debian 2.1 in the middle of
November, 1998.
Secondly, I myself have sucessfully installed sgml-tools 2.x on
Debian, but it takes a bit of doing. But, really, SGMLtools now is
just what I would call a "DocBook driver". We already ship very new
DocBook (3.1, 3.0, and 2.4.1) DTDs, as well as pretty fresh
docbook-dsssl stuff in unstable. So there's no reason why, with a
little knowhow, you couldn't install sgml-tools 2.x manually on a
Debian system.
That being said, I will personally make it a priority that sgml-tools
2.x packages are uploaded to stable soon.
|> If somebody is going to throw "hacker release" at me now, I'm
|> simply stating that a package that does not install cleanly, and
|> cannot be uninstalled cleanly, has no business messing with /etc or
|> /usr locations. Maybe it would be appropriate to make use a fixed
|> prefix (short of making --prefix works flawlessly) and places said
|> hacker release self contained into a location where rm -rf does the
|> trick?
Well, here you seem to be attacking the sgml-tools maintainers. I've
had a few conversations with Cees de Groot. One *bad* thing about
Debian SGML at this point is that we don't follow Cees' standards
listed at
<URL:http://www.sgmltools.org/docs/sgml-dir-standard/t01.html>. If we
*did* support that very excellent standard, I'm sure there would be a
very nice, easy installation process, even from hacker releases or CVS
archives. Again, it's fully our intention (from talking to the
sgml-base Debian maintainer) that Cees' excellent, modular proposal is
supported in potato (the next release of Debian).
Aside from that, if you are trying to support sgml-tools 2.x on
Debian, based on my rather foggy (it was a while ago) remembrance, all
you have to do is pick a few files out of packages/cvs/sgmltools/ and
put them in the right places and add entries for that stuff in the
catalog files. Make sure you have sgml-base, sgml-data, docbook, and
docbook-stylesheets pacakges installed.
--
.....Adam Di Carlo....adam@onShore.com.....<URL:http://www.onShore.com/>
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