Re: DTD version confusion

[Gavin Smith]

On 6 April 2015 at 23:06, Karl Berry <address@hidden> wrote:
>     With that url the catalog.xml automatically
>     generated from tp/maintain/catalog.xml.in
>
> Hadn't entered my mind.  Glad you knew how to deal with it.
> What uses that file?  I tried some greps but could not discern.

I found that in tp/Texinfo/Convert/TexinfoXML.pm, in the
"format_header" function there is a reference to the gnu.org DTD
location:

my $header =  "<?xml version=\"1.0\"${encoding}?>".'
<!DOCTYPE texinfo PUBLIC "-//GNU//DTD TexinfoML
V'.$texinfo_dtd_version.'//EN"
"http://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/dtd/'.$texinfo_dtd_version.'/texinfo.dtd">
'. $self->open_element('texinfo', ['xml:lang',
$self->get_conf('documentlanguage')])."\n";

Whatever catalog.xml is used for, this would have to be updated as
well, if we wanted to use a savannah URL.

>     Another possibility for the pretests would be to use
>     TEXINFO_DTD_VERSION=6.0 and put the dtd on the final location
>
> Well ... doesn't it seem strange to (possibly) have different files be
> version 6.0 at different times?

I agree it would be a bad idea to upload a DTD as a future version in
case someone views it as final and definitive (it might be cached
locally or whatever).

>So, my question is: isn't it problematic when the xml files produced by
the development/pretest version refer to a nonexistent dtd?  It seems
like a resulting .xml file, if actually tried to be used (by pretesters
or other contributors), would be invalid since the dtd is not present in
the expected place.

I know very little about what it would mean to "use" an xml file, and
what people using an xml file produced by a development version would
want to do with it that would require the DTD file. I would expect
that there would be ways of experimenting with different xml formats
that wouldn't require uploading the DTD file in the final location on
the public server. For example, what if someone wants to go back to an
earlier development version in the revision control (SVN) to see how
something worked then? They would get the DTD file and the programs
that produce XML files reverted in synch, but any references to a URL,
like to savannah or a "texinfo-dev.dtd" would be wrong. I would expect
that tools to transform XML files would have a way of specifying a
local DTD file to use.

> What if we used a completely generic version like "dev" (no numbers)
> between official releases, including for pretests?  Then there is only
> one dtd being labeled 6.0, and it is simpler to understand what to
> switch to and when.  We'd still only have to regenerate tests once upon
> a switch to dev, and then a second time for the real release.

If it's possible to specify a local DTD file to use to XML tools,
compare the difficulty of that to the inconvenience of regenerating
the test results.