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

[Joe C. <ma...@ma...>]

On Mon, 27 May 2002, Dan Mueth wrote:

>
> 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.

I don't think I was clear.  The build of gnome-core _succeeds_, however,
the OMF files for certain components are not installed.  This breaks
FreeBSD's packaging system since the plist refers to files that do not
exist.  The Makefiles look pretty solid to me.

>
> 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?

I'd like to see full backwards compat.  However, the more I look into
things, I _think_ I can create both scrollkeeper (0.2) and scrollkeeper2
(0.3.x|0.4.x) ports which will be built depending on the version of GNOME
desired.  It looks like GNOME 1.4.x libraries (i.e. gnome-libs, oaf,
bonobo, etc.) don't really use scrollkeeper as much as the desktop
components (i.e. gnome-core, gnome-applets, gnome-utils, etc.) do.  If
that's the case, then I should be okay.  Thoughts....

>
> BTW: Does Yelp render SGML documents?

No.  I get all kinds of errors trying to render GNOME help documents in
yelp unless I have SK 0.3.6 installed (and then, I can only render GNOME 2
docs).  This may be a FreeBSD thing, though.

I really appreciate this dialog.  It's helping a lot with the porting
process.

Joe

>
> Dan
>
>
>
>

PGP Key : http://www.marcuscom.com/pgp.asc