On 2019-09-10 at 18:44:22, Jeff King wrote:
> First off, thank you again for your explanations. I dread digging into
> how anything related to docbook or xml works, so having you serve it up
> on a silver platter is a delight. :)

I'm happy to do it.  I was an English major in college and virtually
every assignment I wrote in DocBook, so I'm far more familiar with it
than I'm sure most people ever want to be.

> Isn't this already the case just with the docbook DTDs? I.e., if you
> don't have a catalog entry, it is up to the tool (xmlto in this case) to
> either fail or try to fetch it. That seems like the best we can do. And
> as you note, this typically just works out of the box on modern
> installs. Of course people may want to build on non-modern ones, but
> IMHO we should probably be more aggressive about dropping legacy support
> in the documentation and pointing people to the pre-formatted pages.

Yeah, that's a good point.  Since we know that most people will have
catalogs working (since usually fetching the DTD repeatedly over the
network gets you rate-limited resulting in a failure), I think it's fair
for us to do this.  And anyway, DocBook 5 isn't exactly new: it's been
around since 2009, IIRC, so distros will have it.

I know Homebrew doesn't have this problem, since they fetch the prebuilt
docs, even for HEAD (master) builds.

I'll try to get the patch written up and sent out today or tomorrow.
-- 
brian m. carlson: Houston, Texas, US
OpenPGP: https://keybase.io/bk2204