Re: [Scrollkeeper-devel] scrollkeeper-0.3.x and GNOME 1.4.x

[Dan M. <mu...@al...>]

On 27 May 2002, Joe Marcus Clarke wrote:

> Hi, I'm with the FreeBSD GNOME porting team, and I recently ran into a
> big problem when I upgraded scrollkeeper from 0.2 to 0.3.6 on FreeBSD. 
> Some of the OMF files included with gnome-core (and I'm sure other GNOME
> 1.4 ports might have been affected as well) failed to compile under
> scrollkeeper-preinstall because they contained illegal UTF-8 characters.
> 
> I realize this is due to the fact that scrollkeeper-0.3.x uses libxml2
> which requires all XML to be in UTF-8 or -16 or have an encoding
> directive in the <?xml ?> header.  I know this issue probably falls
> squarely in the GNOME camp, but I thought I'd test the waters here, too.
> 
> Is there a way to get scrollkeeper 0.3.x to play nicely with GNOME 1.4.x
> without going through and patching all the OMF files to have an
> encoding="ISO-8859-1" directive?

As things stand now, there is no simple way to get Sk-0.3.x to work nicely
with GNOME 1.4.x without editing lots of OMF files and docs.  The major
change was that we moved from libxml to libxml2, while the docs moved from
DocBook/SGML to DocBook/XML.  As you have noted, the encoding must be
explicitly stated for many locales.  Additionally, Sk >= 0.3.6 validates
the OMF files before trying to use them, and the GNOME 1.4.x OMF files
won't validate without a couple changes.  There is little value in getting
SK-0.3.x to work with GNOME-1.4.x since it works for DocBook/XML, but not
DocBook/SGML which is what is in GNOME-1.4.x.

It is unfortunate that this compatibility had to be broken, but it was
better to get all these improvements(SGML->XML, libxml->libxml2, no
DTD->DTD validation) in early on.  In the future, any changes to the DTD
can be more cleanly handled since we can use multiple DTD versions, and
write stylesheets to convert between them automatically.  I don't forsee 
any changes in the preferred document format or xml libraries for a long 
time.

For FreeBSD, I'd recommend just using GNOME 1.4.x with the latest stable
ScrollKeeper (0.2.0), which should work fine.  (Note that ScrollKeeper
0.3.x is the developer-only series.)  GNOME 2.0 and ScrollKeeper 0.4.0
should work together well and be out in a month or two.  After that, the
use of versioned DTDs and stylesheets should allow us to maintain 
backwards compatibility.

Dan