[Haskell-cafe] ghc ./configure stalls on docbook DTD

[Duncan Coutts]

On Mon, 2009-05-18 at 12:09 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:

> I have the following complaint from Roman in my inbox, which I think is 
> about the same thing:
> 
>  > one big nuisance when building ghc is that configure tries to connect 
>  > to the internet. The culprit is the FP_GEN_DOCBOOK_XML macro in
>  > aclocal.m4 which is used when checking for DocBook DTD. It generates
>  > an XML file which references http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2
>  > /docbookx.dtd and then runs xmllint which, naturally, wants to load
>  > the dtd. Depending on the quality of my internet connection and on
>  > the availability of oasis-open.org this check sometimes (infrequently
>  > but very annoyingly) takes up to a 2 or 3 minutes for me. Given that
>  > the DTD in question can be freely copied, why not redistribute it
>  > with ghc?
> 
>  > Another www reference is in FP_GEN_FO (to
>  > http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format) but that never seems to bite me.
> 
> I know almost but not quite exactly nothing about how to find DTDs.  But 
> I do recall that Duncan mentioned to me recently that there's a much 
> better way to do this - Duncan?

Oh, yes, use --nonet to both xmllint and xsltproc. That's what we do for
the Cabal user guide which is still using xml docbook, along with:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="US-ASCII"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN"
  "http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2/docbookx.dtd" >

I expect the uri "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.2//EN" is required so
that it can match the uri in the local catalog.

Duncan