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

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

On Mon, 27 May 2002, Joe Clarke wrote:

> 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.

Ah, ok.  I'm not familiar with the plist system.  I'm glad that at least 
the build and regular install work correctly.  I hope the plist system can 
be massaged into ignoring these missing files.

If we have to, we could hack scrollkeeper-preinstall to have a different
failure mode where the OMF file is written.  The easy ways to do this
though would produce an invalid OMF file, without the encoding declaration
(eg. just copy the OMF file as is).  It would at least allow the package
build to proceed, although SK would not be able to register these
documents when they are installed. (It would silently fail to register
them, writing a message to the log file at install time.)  Tell me what
you think, as this would be easy to do and may be helpful for other
packaging systems.

> > 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....

In GNOME 1.4.x, only Nautilus accesses the ScrollKeeper database info.  
All of the packages with end-user documentation (ie. the desktop 
components) install docs with OMF files, while none of the platform 
packages (ie. libraries) do.

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

:)

It is good to review these things periodically, since most people who need 
to know these things don't always watch this mailing list.

Dan