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

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

On 27 May 2002, John Fleck wrote:

> On Sun, 2002-05-26 at 23:46, Dan Mueth wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > 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.
> > 
> 
> But there are likely to be mixed systems out there for a long time to
> come. One of the premises of GNOME2 is that a lot of old GNOME1 apps
> will not be ported in the near term, and therefore both systems should
> be able to run in parallel.
> 
> In addition, to the extent ScrollKeeper has been adopted more widely,
> there may be other old-style OMF files remaining in the wild.
> 
> Is it possible to make the newer versions (SK>3.6 or whenever the new
> DTD came into use) more tolerant of the error caused by an old OMF that
> doesn't validate against the DTD?

Well, we definitely want any package to build and install fine, even if it
contains OMF files for SK-0.2.0 and the user's/packager's system has
SK-0.4.0.  On the SK side, this means we just determine if the OMF file
validates and fail gracefully if it doesn't.  I think SK already does this
correctly, although it is worth double-checking.  It also means the
Makefiles must ignore this sort of error and complete the build and
install.  I tried to be very generous with ignoring errors from
ScrollKeeper in Makefiles for other packages for this reason.  It sounds
like I may not have been generous enough though, since Joe said he had
gnome-core fail to build.

If we want complete support for older OMF files, we would need to be able
to automatically convert old OMF files to conform to the DTD.  It looks
like John has made a lot of progress in this.  We would need to try to
guess the encoding, which we can probably get right some but not all the
time.  For this to be useful, we would have to add support for SGML docs
back to ScrollKeeper.  The original SGML support used openjade which a lot
of distributors and people complained about as being crufty and uncommon.  
We would need to use the SGML support DV put into libxml2, which should be
much better but still has some issues I think.

The question is, do we want SK-0.4.0 to fail gracefully for old OMF files 
or do we want to try to get complete backwards compatibility with full 
functionality?

BTW: Does Yelp render SGML documents?

Dan