DOCBOOK-APPS: Re: conditionalization of XML

[Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2002 at 02:42:48PM -0400, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> Daniel Veillard <veillard@redhat.com>:
> >   This will be in the next libxslt release.
> 
> Can you give us a rough timeframe?

 When it's ready. 

> And what do you expect the release number 
> to be?

 Probably 1.0.22 usually within one month.

  http://xmlsoft.org/XSLT/news.html

> While we're talking command-line options, Daniel, I have a small request.
> It's for a small hook in xsltproc that would address a general problem.
[...]
> But there's a problem.  An old familiar one, generic to the use of all
> kinds of preprocessors.  When I'm browsing XML errors in my Emacs
> window, they point to the processed file rather than the original
> input.  Aaarrgghh!
[...]
> There are a couple of different ways we could go to solve the problem:
> 
> (1) You add support for ?if? and friends to xsltproc.  Probably the
>     fastest route to a complete solution.
> 
> (2) You tell me you'll take a patch from me to implement them.  I'd
>     have to learn the xsltproc code, so it would take longer, but I 
>     can do that.

  Honnestly 1/ and 2/ are not acceptable. Now if someone decides
to standardize something like <?if?> then it's a big mess.
Moreover if this can be done by a small and fast external preprocessing,
why try to put everything in the same tool ? 

> (3) You add --error-filename.  Has the advantage that it could be used
>     with other preprocessors.

  Basically the problem is that the processor working on a processed
file gives back the error in terms of the processed file filename and
line number instead of the original one. I can hardly see how it could
be otehrwise, the line number will be wrong anyway and even attempting
to provide the initial filename is only a partial solution due to the
entities support problem.
  Who else is gonna use this switch ? I could try to hack this but this
sounds partial solution and not of widespread use, right ?

  Technically it would be messy too, the error reporting routine is
within the library and uses the document URL as the resource name source,
changing it would require a global variable in the library, and that
I try to avoid adding as much as possible.

  Can't you just sed the output in case of errors ?
    s/^processed/orgiginal/
of the stderr stream doesn't sound hard to setup ...

Daniel

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