Re: geeqie FTBFS involving yelp

[Simon McVittie <smcv@debian.org>]

(cc'ing what appears to be the relevant bug, any further discussion 
should probably go to the bug only)

On Sun, 14 Sep 2025 at 13:00:30 +0200, Andreas Ronnquist wrote:
> (It seems like yelp got an upload just yesterday, but this problem was there before that).

yelp-build is part of yelp-tools (a separate source package which hasn't 
changed significantly for a few years), not yelp. If we say yelp is like an 
ebook reader, then yelp-tools and yelp-xsl are like the tool that 
generates ebooks - related, but not actually the same codebase.

yelp-xsl did change somewhat recently, that might be related.

> I'm the maintainer of geeqie, which just got a bug that yelp-build fails,
> relevant part of buildlog:
...
> > /build/reproducible-path/geeqie-2.6.1/build/../doc/docbook/GuideIndex.xml:2:
> > I/O error : failed to load "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.5/docbookx.dtd":
> > loading error

You will need the package that has an offline copy of that DTD 
registered in the "XML catalog" for offline use - probably docbook-xml. 
(I found this out by `apt-file search 4.5/docbookx.dtd` and then reading 
the package descriptions of the docbook and docbook-xml packages.)

I would guess that some other package in geequie's build-deps might have 
pulled it in as a dependency before, but perhaps not any more?

If there are other errors in the buildd log referring to URLs of DTDs, 
stylesheets, etc. that can't be loaded, you'll also need the packages 
that provide offline copies of those.

> Strangely the link that seems to be the problem works fine if I just
> open it in a browser.

That's expected, but documentation-generation tools usually instruct the 
XML processor (xsltproc or equivalent) to work in offline mode, where 
the only external references that are available are the ones registered 
in the "XML catalog" (/etc/xml).

> I have also tried building the package in my unstable amd64 virtual
> machine with the network disconnected and that build still works, so
> this is all a bit strange to me.

If this is a non-minimal environment, then it probably has docbook-xml 
installed for some other reason?

    smcv