Bug#556471: FTBFS: cannot generate system identifier for public text "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V3.1//EN"

[Goswin von Brederlow <goswin-v-b@web.de>]

David Kalnischkies <kalnischkies+debian@gmail.com> writes:

> tags 556471 + info
> thanks
>
> Hi Goswin von Brederlow,
>
> i think your problem is the same as the one occurring in two
> mips builds [0]. I don't know how/why it is fixed now but mips
> does build apt now successfully and i can't reproduce it in
> either my unclean system or my pbuilder environment
> (both i386 arch) so i don't know where to start looking for, but
> a very quick look suggests that in the failing builds the docbook
> package is not pulled in, but in the successful it is -
> so it is maybe a build-dep error in apt, but as apt doesn't seem to
> use the docbook package directly it is maybe a dependency
> weakness in an other package?
>
>
> Best regards / Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
>
> David "DonKult" Kalnischkies
>
> [0] https://buildd.debian.org/build.php?pkg=apt&arch=mips&ver=0.7.24

I can confirm that docbook was not installed and installing docbook
solves the problem.

It could be a bug in apt if it uses some feature of another tool that
requires docbook. The "another tool" might only recommend docbook as
only that special feature needs docbook while most don't.

Do some buildds install recommends and others don't? But even that
doesn't seem to explain it:

% aptitude why docbook
i   docbook-xsl Recommends docbook-xml (>= 4.1.2-4)
i A docbook-xml Suggests   docbook

MfG
        Goswin