Lengthy "xmlto" build step in Cygwin.

Lengthy "xmlto" build step in Cygwin.

[Kaz Kylheku]

Hi All,

What's this doing?

   Writing faq.html for article(faq)
   sed -i 's;<a name="id[mp][0-9]*"></a>;;g' faq/faq.html
   ../../.././winsup/doc/bodysnatcher.pl faq/faq.html
   xmlto --skip-validation --with-dblatex pdf -o cygwin-ug-net/ -m 
../../.././winsup/doc/fo.xsl ../../..  /./winsup/doc/cygwin-ug-net.xml
   Build the book set list...


   Build the listings...

It sat for a long time in "book set list ..." with the CPU idle.

Same thing for "Build the listings...". It's just sitting there and 
sitting there.

Task Manager shows an xsltproc.exe that isn't doing anything.

Is this making network calls to an unresponsive server in Cameroon or 
something?


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Re: Lengthy "xmlto" build step in Cygwin.

[Warren Young]

On Jun 30, 2016, at 11:19 AM, Kaz Kylheku <kaz@kylheku.com> wrote:
> 
> It sat for a long time in "book set list ..." with the CPU idle.

That means you have the DocBook tools installed but don’t have the DocBook XSL stylesheets installed, so it has to fetch them over the Internet.  Those Internet servers are heavily overloaded because of all the *other* users with the same system misconfiguration you have.

Solution: install the docbook-xsl package.

Tip: In the future, you can debug problems like this by adding --nonet to the xsltproc command.  That prevents it from trying to download XSL files and such from the Internet, so that if you are missing local copies, it fails fast.  IMHO that flag should be the default in the stock Makefiles.
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Re: Lengthy "xmlto" build step in Cygwin.

[Hans-Bernhard Bröker]

Am 01.07.2016 um 20:36 schrieb Warren Young:

> That means you have the DocBook tools installed but don’t have the
> DocBook XSL stylesheets installed, so it has to fetch them over the
> Internet.  Those Internet servers are heavily overloaded because of
> all the *other* users with the same system misconfiguration you
> have.

Well, in all fairness it has to be pointed out that this 
mis-configuration was set up, or at least not actively prevented, by the 
packages involved.

Now the need for these packages _is_ actually mentioned somewhere:

winsup/doc/README:
=======================
ADDITIONAL BUILD REQUIREMENTS FOR DOCUMENTATION

dblatex
docbook-xml45
docbook-xsl
docbook2x-texi
gzip
texinfo
xmlto
=======================

But of these only docbox2x-texi is checked for by 
winsup/doc/configure.ac.  At least xmlto surely has to be checked for, 
too, don't you think?  And maybe it would be possible to add a check for 
the docbook-xml45 package (or equivalent) here, to at least output a 
warning.

Or, to turn this around: shouldn't one of these packages:

	xmlto
	dblatex
	docbook2x

formally require package docbook-xml45 (and possibly all the other 
docbook-* packages)?


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Re: Lengthy "xmlto" build step in Cygwin.

[Warren Young]

On Jul 1, 2016, at 2:52 PM, Hans-Bernhard Bröker wrote:
> 
> Am 01.07.2016 um 20:36 schrieb Warren Young:
> 
>> That means you have the DocBook tools installed but don’t have the
>> DocBook XSL stylesheets installed
> 
> only docbox2x-texi is checked for by winsup/doc/configure.ac.

You’re in a fine position to fix that, then. :)

> At least xmlto surely has to be checked for, too, don't you think?

That and xsltproc, at least.

> And maybe it would be possible to add a check for the docbook-xml45 package

The trick is finding that out portably.

You can’t check for version 4.5 stylesheets specifically, because someday the docs may move to DocBook 5.

You also can’t use Cygwin-specific methods to check for this because the docs are also built on non-Cygwin systems.  The official builds of everything under winsup are in fact cross-compiled on a Fedora box rather than built under Cygwin.

Finally, the stylesheets may be in different locations on different machines.

Probably the most portable method is something like

   if ! grep -q file://.*docbook /etc/xml/catalog
   then
       AC_MSG_ERROR([the DocBook stylesheets are not installed])
   fi

Consider that pseudocode.  (Untested, written off the top of my head.)

> Or, to turn this around: shouldn't one of these packages:
> 
> 	xmlto
> 	dblatex
> 	docbook2x
> 
> formally require package docbook-xml45

Certainly not xmlto or xsltproc, as they’re both used for more than DocBook.

dblatex could, I suppose, but you’ll find that Fedora doesn’t tie those two together, either:

  http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/rpminfo?rpmID=7275706

That’s probably because dblatex will consume either XSL or SGML stylesheets, and they don’t want to depend on both.  Plus, as you’ve found, the network fetch option does work; it’s just sllllooooow.

Even if you fix that, there's more than just dblatex for rendering DocBook to PDF, so you’d have to chase all those avenues, too.  For instance, there’s FOP, which isn’t DocBook specific, so making docbook-xsl a dependency of it would be wrong, so you’re left hangnig.

docbook2x is perhaps a better candidate, though I don’t actually see a reason it’s the only possible build option.  I suspect you could do everything it does in pure XSLT, obviating the need for it.  So, you’d still need to call out the need for docbook-xsl in the build instructions.

Bottom line, you just have to know you need these things, if you’re going to work with DocBook.  It’s just part of the learning curve.
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