Re: [PATCH 5/6] gnu: Enable gnome-doc-utils tests

[ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès)]

John Darrington <john@darrington.wattle.id.au> skribis:

> On Tue, Jul 15, 2014 at 10:59:17PM +0200, Ludovic Court??s wrote:

[...]

>      The problem is that ???search-path-specification??? is meant for $PATH-like
>      variables that list directories, not files.
>
> That occurred to me too.  But what problems does it actually cause?

That we can’t use it for $XML_CATALOG_FILES.

>      So I see two solutions:
>      
>        1. Patch libxml2 so that it honors a new variable, say
>           $XML_CATALOG_DIRECTORIES, which would allow us to use
>           ???search-path-specification???.
>      
>        2. Augment support for search paths to allow file-based search paths.
>      
>      (2) may be best in the long run, but it has ramifications in different
>      places.
>      
>
> (1) seems like a good idea only if upstream can be persuaded to adopt it.

Which is unlikely, given that it’s redundant with $XML_CATALOG_FILES.

> What are the ramifications of (2) ?

There are changes in the build tools, for instance ‘search-path-as-list’
(used by ‘set-path-environment-variable’, used in gnu-build-system.scm)
expects directories, not files.  And all this calls things
‘directories’.

This is a change we could schedule for the next core-updates.

WDYT?

Ludo’.