Re: status of /ust/lib/sgml -> /usr/share/sgml transition
On , September 7, Ian Zimmerman wrote:
Hi Ian,
Geez, you're so hard on a guy. And on a Friday, too.;)
> Mark> 1. Entity References in Upstream Files (mods, dtds, ...)
> Mark> In the case of the jrefentry.dtd [3], the upstream source
> Mark> defines the full docbook xml dtd as the entity '%docbook' and
> Mark> then references it as follows:
>
> Mark> <!ENTITY % docbook PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
> Mark> "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd";>
> Mark> %docbook;
>
> Mark> To be on the safe side, when I packaged this dtd I changed the
> Mark> SYSTEM ID to a relative path and ditched the PUBLIC ID like so:
>
> Mark> <!ENTITY % docbook SYSTEM "../../../dtd/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd">
> Mark> %docbook;
>
> I think this is terrible. It means going along with the fact that XML
> tools without catalog support are broken. Why should users of tools
> that get it right (Jade) continue to suffer for that?
Well, I did that when we first started packaging the xml stuff. And it
should work just fine whether or not you have catalog support.
Adam even got railed with bug reports on docbook-xml (I hope I'm
remembering this correctly...) because he didn't do a SYSTEM id fix
with the param entities that define the iso charsets. So it's not
always that simple.
BTW, I'd prefer not to edit any of the identifiers in any upstream
modules, but I'd rather be sure that a newbie doesn't immediately get
scared away from this stuff just because the tools couldn't resolve
the entities.
I'd really like to avoid situations like the one described in the
following article. A nice guy decided to contribute to the gnome doc
effort and proceeded to install DocBook and friends. Sounds like he
had somewhat of a frustrating experience. The article is here:
http://www.la-samhna.de/library/GnomeDoc/
And here's a long mailing list thread started by Eric Raymond last
summer borne out of similar frustration:
http://sources.redhat.com/ml/docbook-tools-discuss/2000/msg00202.html
I'm honestly trying to put the users first, in accordance with item 4
of the Debian Social Contract (I hope that didn't sound snotty, I'm
quite sincere about my user-oriented priorities):
4. Our Priorities are Our Users and Free Software
At any rate, I can promise you that the packages will work well and
that the finalized implementation will possess the sort of
self-consistent elegance that draws folks like you & me to the debian
side of the galaxy.
Now that I'm finished spewing all that rubbish at you, I'd like to
emphasize that I agree with you very much in principle. But sometimes
ya just gotta suck up some of that idealism and actually go out in
public wearing that weird sweater-thing your aunt gave you as a
graduation gift.
Thanks for the feedback,
Mark
> --
> Ian Zimmerman, Oakland, California, U.S.A.
> The easiest way to win an argument: ridicule your opponent's basic
> assumptions by stating their negation and postfixing it with ", right?"
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>
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--
_____________________________________
Mark Johnson <mark@duke.edu>
Debian SGML <mrj@debian.org>
Home Page: <http://dulug.duke.edu/~mark/>
GPG fp: 50DF A22D 5119 3485 E9E4 89B2 BCBC B2C8 2BE2 FE81
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