Probably some of the changes introduced to catalog.c
I will try to look into this.
You should really be using the XML catalogs anyway, and
: is a perfectly legal filesystem character.

Daniel

Last time we discussed this, we agreed that the URI notation should 
be supported in these environment variables, because this is the only 
notation which is the same on all platforms. 

This results in 'file://...' notations being fully supported. Remote 
resources are supported as well, by design, even if their use is 
discouraged.

This means that the colon ':' cannot be used to separate entries any 
longer. At this moment, only the space ' ' can be used for this 
purpose, as it is an obvious character which cannot be contained in 
an URI without escaping.

Path specifications in the native filesystem notation are supported 
as well on all platforms, as long they use the space to separate 
entries. If you have a directory with a space in its name, you must 
use an URI notation for this directory. You can mix URI and 
filesystem notations at whim.

Making this work with a colon as a separator again will break the use 
of URIs on Unix. It will break entirely on all platforms which have 
non-Unix filesystem notation which involves the colon frequently 
(Windows for sure, perhaps VMS and RiscOS as well?)


Igor

Basically I agree with both of you, esp. with Daniel's short statement
(use proper catalogs).

OTOH, please leave SGML_CATALOG_FILES as it ever was (for
compatibility, or soemthing).  Invent a new variable that works as
described by Igor (SGML_CATALOG_RESOURCES or something like that).

Is this a way to go?

This is the documentation of xmlLoadCatalogs as found     
in the version 2.4.16 (which is the minimum version we currently  
require)  
  
/**    
 * xmlLoadCatalogs:    
 * @paths:  a list of file path separated by ':' or spaces    
....  
  
So kdoctools follows documented behaviour. So unless you want 
it to be libxml3 I'd say simply breaking the behaviour of the variable 
is no good and Karl's suggestion is the next best thing. 
 

Peace, brothers :-)

Back then, when we discussed this matter on the libxml mailing list, 
the talk was about the default catalogs. It was even discovered that 
the default catalog variable (XML_CATALOG_FILES) didn't work at all 
if you put a list of paths in it, no matter how you separate the 
entries. This was a clear sign that noone has been using the feature 
and nothing existing can be broken. I introduced an URI notation into 
this variable in order to make it work as expected on all platforms 
believing that nothing will be broken because it didn't work at all 
until then.

This has however nothing to do with the xmlLoadCatalogs function. The 
function xmlLoadCatalogs was changed as well, which I did in oder to 
get a consistent behaviour between XML_CATALOG_FILES and 
SGML_CATALOG_FILES when used through xmllint utility. That was 
obviously a mistake :-) 

I would suggest:

1. I'll revert the behaviour of xmlLoadCatalogs function to allow 
entry separation with either the space or a colon, just the way it 
was before my machinations.

2. I can introduce another function, say xmlLoadCatalogList or 
whatever the name may be, which would then introduce the new 
behaviour. 

The content of XML_CATALOG_FILES will not be changed by that. 
XML_CATALOG_FILES will still be expected to separate entries with a 
space and use an URI notation where necessary.

Is that okay? You would have the compatibility back, but would have 
to change the format of your path collection strings, should you 
decide to put it in the envvar XML_CATALOG_FILES in the future.

Igor

Okay, I fixed this now. I gave xmlLoadCatalogs the old behaviour. 

Igor

Thanks a lot -- your recipe sounds good.

I'm sure coolo will give it a try some time soon and report problems
if any ;-)

This should be closed in the last releases,

Daniel