[xml/sgml-pkgs] debian-edu-doc FTBFS but only in sid not in etch

[Andreas Hoenen]

Holger Levsen <holger at layer-acht.org> wrote:

<snip/>
> http://bugs.debian.org/458879 describes how debian-edu-doc fails to build from
> source but only in sid not in etch, and I'm bcc:ing you, the dblatex and
> libxml2-utils maintainers, to kindly ask for your help/input/hint as I
> have no idea why.
<snip/>

The hanging is explained as follows:

In order to improve the error messages of dblatex (dblatex bug report
#451267), I have patched dblatex (beginning with 0.2.8-1) to
postvalidate the DocBook input in case of transformation failures and to
pass through the validation error messages to the caller [1].  Thus for
invalid DocBook input the user will receive a meaningful error message
in addition to the sometimes strange technical error description.

Unfortunately my patch hangs on huge amounts of xmllint error output
(and itil.xml is "very invalid": 732938 bytes of validation failure
messages).  Obviously it is a very bad idea to open a subprocess with
setting its stderr to a pipe, then waiting for the subprocess to exit
before reading from the pipe.  Ouch, too stupid, I'm really sorry.

I will fix this bug in the next debian dblatex release which I'm
preparing currently.  (At the moment I consider to abstain from reading
and passing through the xmllint error messages - your case indicates
that the output might become too big, moreover the user can call xmllint
explicitly afterwards to analyze the validation problem.)  Feel free to
open a bug report on dblatex and connect it to yours or whatever seems
to be appropriate.

However, even without the postvalidation hanging the current versions of
dblatex respectively xsltproc are just unable to transform itil.xml.
Sorry, invalid input sometimes is handled properly, but only in lucky
cases.

[1] debian/patches/20_postvalidation_on_failure.dpatch

Regards, Andreas
-- 
Andreas Hoenen <andreas.hoenen at arcor.de>

GPG: 1024D/B888D2CE
     A4A6 E8B5 593A E89B 496B
     82F0 728D 8B7E B888 D2CE
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 188 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-xml-sgml-pkgs/attachments/20080209/1c7d4481/attachment.pgp