Subject: process hangs when converting sgml documentation to PDF

From: Saquib Farooq Malik <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 00:08:57 -0700 (PDT)

Hi,

  I tried to get a PDF version of the pgsql
documentation. the process i used is as follows

$ cd  $PGSQL_ROOT
$ ./configure
$ cd $PG_ROOT/doc/src/sgml
$ gmake postgres.pdf

the outpout i get is as follows :

 LC_ALL=C "/usr/bin/perl" /usr/bin/collateindex.pl -f
-g -o bookindex.sgml -N
{ \
  echo "<!entity version \"8.0.3\">"; \
  echo "<!entity majorversion \"`expr 8.0.3 :
'\([0-9][0-9]*\.[0-9][0-9]*\)'`\">"; \
} >version.sgml
"/usr/bin/perl" ./mk_feature_tables.pl YES
../../../src/backend/catalog/sql_feature_packages.txt
../../../src/backend/catalog/sql_features.txt >
features-supported.sgml
"/usr/bin/perl" ./mk_feature_tables.pl NO
../../../src/backend/catalog/sql_feature_packages.txt
../../../src/backend/catalog/sql_features.txt >
features-unsupported.sgml
openjade  -D . -c
/usr/share/sgml/docbook/dsssl-stylesheets/catalog -d
stylesheet.dsl -t tex -V tex-backend -i output-print
-V texpdf-output -o postgres.tex-pdf postgres.sgml

and that's it, the prompt never comes back.

  Can anybody please tell me why the process hangs up,
how can I get the PDf version from the sgml
documentations, using gmake.

 thank you

Saquib

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---

From: Neil Conway <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 17:18:09 +1000

> and that's it, the prompt never comes back.

Some people have reported extremely long build times for the SGML docs 
(e.g. on the order of a week of CPU time, in some cases). As far as I 
know, this is a problem with the SGML toolchain, not the Postgres 
documentation itself.

> documentations, using gmake.

You can get the prebuilt PDFs from:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/manuals/

If you need to build them yourself, be prepared for it to take quite 
some time...

-Neil

---

From: Volkan YAZICI <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 10:37:36 +0300

Hi,

On 6/7/05, Saquib Farooq Malik <[email-masked]> wrote:
> Can anybody please tell me why the process hangs up

IMHO, you can try using strace (or any similar variant) to see if it's
working in the background. (There could also be a verbose param. for
jade too.) HTH.

Regards.

---

From: Bruce Momjian <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 10:48:59 -0400 (EDT)

> working in the background. (There could also be a verbose param. for

Would someone report this to the SGML guys and get them to fix it?

-- 
  Bruce Momjian                        |  http://candle.pha.pa.us
  [email-masked]               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
  +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Newtown Square, Pennsylvania 19073

---

From: Peter Eisentraut <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 17:59:19 +0200

> Would someone report this to the SGML guys and get them to fix it?

There are no SGML guys anymore.  The toolchain is abandoned.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/

---

From: Bruce Momjian <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 12:14:56 -0400 (EDT)

> There are no SGML guys anymore.  The toolchain is abandoned.

Oh, you mean we are using tools from an abandoned project?  What replace
it and should we be using that?

---

From: Alvaro Herrera <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 12:39:47 -0400

> There are no SGML guys anymore.  The toolchain is abandoned.

Excellent :-(  How about we discuss again whether to move to XML?  I
assume there is a newer toolchain for that.  I do have issues building
the docs here on a Debian unstable machine (not that i have researched
the problem a lot really.)

AFAIR the problem was that there wasn't a way to include certain parts
of the documentation depending on whether some symbol was defined or
not.  Is that still true?  Furthermore, do we use that feature and how,
and is there a way to work around the problem?

I think it is the standalone-include and standalone-ignore definitions,
isn't it?

-- 
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]surnet.cl>)
Voy a acabar con todos los humanos / con los humanos yo acabaré
voy a acabar con todos / con todos los humanos acabaré (Bender)

---

From: Peter Eisentraut <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 7 Jun 2005 19:57:16 +0200

Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Excellent :-(  How about we discuss again whether to move to XML?

You can already use "XML" today.  Go to doc/src/sgml and type "make 
testxml" and you'll get HTML documentation built using XSLT 
stylesheets.

The bad news, however, is that using the XSLT toolchain the state of the 
print-output-generating tools is even worse.  FOP crashes left and 
right, PassiveTeX is unmaintained and incredibly hard to set up, and 
the rest costs big cash.  In fact, the only reason the DSSSL toolchain 
is still barely maintained is to generate print output.

> AFAIR the problem was that there wasn't a way to include certain
> parts of the documentation depending on whether some symbol was
> defined or not.  Is that still true?  Furthermore, do we use that
> feature and how, and is there a way to work around the problem?

The way around that would be to use the profiling feature of the XSLT 
stylesheets.  But the way it's set up right now, storing the files in 
SGML and converting them to XML on the fly, works out just as well.

---

From: "Joshua D. Drake" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 11:03:04 -0700

> testxml" and you'll get HTML documentation built using XSLT 

One way to do it, is to make an RTF and then print the RTF to a file and 
convert to PDF.

Sincerely,

Joshua D. Drake

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---

From: Tom Lane <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 08 Jun 2005 01:11:32 -0400

> assume there is a newer toolchain for that.

As far as I can tell, Red Hat is still depending on DocBook, so I think
that this format is not quite so dead as all that.  Maybe we need to
take another look at exactly which tools we're using though ...

			regards, tom lane