xmlto required?

[Matthias Andree]

Matt Armstrong <matt at lickey.com> writes:

> I'm trying to build bogofilter from CVS and ran into two problems:
>
> (1) automake 1.6 is required, but Debian stable contains only automake
>     1.5.  (1.6 is less than a year old)

Yes, automake 1.6 is indeed required, and I failed trying automake
1.5. This is a maintainer-only restriction, invisible to the end user
who doesn't want to develop, and it doesn't affect the current SuSE 8.1
or Red Hat 8.0 stable releases. I won't bother.

Please complain to the Debian maintainers about their obnoxiously long
release cycle and about their shipping rotten code in stable.

automake is not the only software that is hopelessly outdated in Debian
stable, they shipped other cruft with 3.0r0, for example
leafnode-1.9.19, that was 14 months old although newer versions fixing
/critical/ bugs have been available more than three months before their
3.0r0 release.

Debian stable is unsuitable for anyone doing serious work with the box.

> (2) make[2]: Entering directory `/home/matt/cvs/bogofilter/doc'
>     xmlto man bogofilter.xml || { rm -f bogofilter.1 ; exit 1 ; }
>     /bin/bash: xmlto: command not found
>
>     The ./configure script should check for xmlto and avoid trying
>     this if it isn't found, no?

No, it should not, it should just choke. :-)

Seriously, we currently need xmlto (www.cyberelk.net AFAIR) to reformat
from DocBook XML to man format. Again, this is only visible to the
maintainer/developer, not to the end user. You'll have to install xmlto
and docbook 4.1 XML if you want to compile from CVS. We may need to
document this.

-- 
Matthias Andree