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

[Simon Marlow]

On 13/05/2009 19:53, Donnie Jones wrote:
> Hello Dan,
>
> Best place to ask is glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org since that is
> the GHC users list.
> I have CC'd your email to the GHC user list.
>
> Cheers.
> --
> Donnie Jones
>
> On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Dan<danielkcook at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> Not sure if this is the right place to ask.
>> GHC 6.10.3 source dist: ./configure takes about 10 minutes to look for
>> DocBook DTD and another 10 to look for DocBook XSL directory.  I was writing
>> this e-mail thinking it had completely crashed.  Any reason why it's so
>> ridiculously slow? A look at 'top' says the CPU is mostly idle during this
>> time, but xmllint is running.

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?

Cheers,
	Simon