[xml/sgml-pkgs] Bug#611418: xml-core: dh_installcatalogs does not handle /etc/sgml and /etc/xml correctly

[Edmund Grimley Evans]

This bug may be related to a problem that we observed on the arm64
buildds in 2014.

On both buildd.debian-ports.org and buildd.debian.org a number of
packages using DocBook for a long time failed to build, but then later
started working. Some of the packages involved were:

aboot dossizola le-dico-de-rene-cougnenc leaktracer rblcheck synergy

You can see how these packages used to fail by looking at the old
logs. For example, here's aboot on debian.org:

http://buildd.debian.org/status/logs.php?pkg=aboot&arch=arm64

The errors always looked like this:

nsgmls srmbootfat.sgml | sgmlspl sgmlspl-specs/docbook2man-spec.pl
nsgmls:srmbootfat.sgml:1:58:W: cannot generate system identifier for
public text "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook V4.1//EN"
nsgmls:srmbootfat.sgml:1:58:E: reference to entity "REFENTRY" for
which no system identifier could be generated
nsgmls:srmbootfat.sgml:1:0: entity was defined here
nsgmls:srmbootfat.sgml:1:58:E: DTD did not contain element declaration
for document type name
nsgmls:srmbootfat.sgml:2:13:E: there is no attribute "ID"
nsgmls:srmbootfat.sgml:2:25:E: element "REFENTRY" undefined
nsgmls:srmbootfat.sgml:4:8:E: element "REFMETA" undefined
...

Although the problem eventually went away by itself on both sets of
buildds I would assume that the underlying bug is still there because
the problem reappeared on buildd.debian.org months after it had
disappeared on buildd.debian-ports.org. I would guess that if you set
up a new set of buildds now you'd get the same problem again.

I suspect that /etc/xml/catalog may have been corrupted in some way
when the builds were failing, but I can't really remember how I came
to have that suspicion.