The status of some deep roots

While there are quite a few packages that are know to be rotting in the tree, and thus are now being pruned away step by step, there are some more interesting facets in the status of Gentoo as a distribution nowadays.

While the more interesting and “experimental” areas seem to have enough people working on them (Ruby to a point, Python more or less, KDE 4, …), there are quite some deeper areas that are just left to rot as well, but cannot really be pruned away. This includes for instance Perl (for which we’re lagging behind a lot, mostly due to the fact that tove is left alone maintaining that huge piece of software), and SGML, which in turn includes all the DocBook support.

I’d like to focus a second on that latter part because I am partly involved in that; since I like using DocBook and I actually use the stylesheets to produce the online version of Autotools Mythbuster using the packages that are available in Portage. Now, when I wanted to make use of DocBook 5, the stylesheet for the namespaced version (very useful to write with emacs and nxml) weren’t available, so I added them, adding support for them to the build-docbook-catalog script. With time, I ended up maintaining the ebuilds for both versions of the stylesheets, and that hasn’t been always the cleanest thing given that upstream dropped the tests entirely in the newer versions (well, technically they are still there, but they don’t work, seems like they lack some extra stuff that is nowhere documented).

Now, I was quite good as I was with this; I just requested stable for the new ebuilds of the stylesheets (both variants) and I could have kept just doing that, but … yesterday I noticed that the list of examples in my guide had broken links, and after mistakenly opening a bug on the upstream tracker, I noticed that the bug is fixed already in the latest version. Which made me smell something: why nobody complained that the old stylesheets were broken? Looking at the list of bugs for the SGML team, you can see that lots of stuff was actually ignored for way too long a time. I tried cleaning up some stuff, duping bugs that were obviously the same, and fixing one in the b-d-c script, but this is one of the internal roots that is rotting, and we need help to save it.

For those interested in helping out, I have taken note of a few things that should probably be done with medium urgency:

• make sure that all the DTDs are available in the latest release, and that they are still available upstream; I had to seed an old distfile today because upstream dropped it;
• try to find a way to install the DocBook 5 schemas properly; right now the nxml-docbook5-schemas package install its own copy of the Relax-NG Compact file; on Fedora 11, there is a package that installs more data about DocBook 5, we should probably use the same original sources; the nxml-docbook5-schemas package could then either be merged in with that package or simply use the already-installed copy;
• replace b-d-c, making it both more generic and using a framework that exists already (like eselect) instead of reinventing the wheel; the XML/DTD catalog can easily be used for more than just DocBook, while I know the Gentoo documentation team does not want for the Gentoo DTD to just be available as a package to install in the system (which would make it much easier to keep updated for the nxml schemas, but sigh), I would love to be able to make fsws available that way (once I’ll finish building the official schema for it and publish it, again more on that in the future);
• find out how one should be testing the DocBook XSL stylesheets, so that we can run tests for them; it would have probably avoided the problem I had with Autotools Mythbuster in the past months;
• package the stylesheets for Xalan and Saxon, which are different from the standard ones; b-d-c already has support for them to a point (although not having to explicit this kind of things in the b-d-c replacement is desirable), but I didn’t have reason to add them.

I don’t think I’ll have much time on working on them in the future, so user contributions are certainly welcome; if you do open any bug for these issue, please do CC me directly, since I don’t intend (yet) to add myself to the sgml alias.