Subject: Re: [xml2rfc-dev] Testing xml2rfc-gui alpha on linux

From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:19:02 +0200

Hi Josh,

Thanks for this.  The procedure below brings up the GUI all right, and
lets me try it out.  Comments on that below.

There are however some other things to comment on, also:

On 2011-08-13 02:05 Josh Bothun said:
> Hi Henrik,
> 
> We are currently still in the process of weighing our options and
> testing various methods of distributing debian and rpm packages for
> linux.
> 
> In the meantime, perhaps the best way for you to be able to test the
> GUI alpha on your debian OS would be with the following procedure:
> 
> 1.  Checkout the latest version of the SVN repository -- the following commands are run from the repository root.

Right.  I see you put the command-line stuff under version2/cli/,
excellent.

> 2.  Install the debian package for pyqt4
> 	$ sudo apt-get install python-qt4

No problems, as expected.

> 3.  Install xml2rfc
> 	$ cd cli && python setup.py install

I first ran this as user, which installed both libs and executable
under ~/.local/bin/, which isn't on my path, and was somewhat
unexpected.  I then ran this as root, which installed to the same path.
I then tried to figure out how to do a system install, and tried --prefix,
but that gave an error message:

  "error: can't combine user with with prefix/exec_prefix/home or install_(plat)base"

I think that for the Linux install, we need to revert to what you had
before, with system install as default, user install on demand.  The
current behaviour diverges too much from the conventions and expected
behaviour for python setup.py-based installs.  The installation
instructions should however specify exactly which switch settings are
needed to install locally for a user, and how to make the executable
end up in a place on the user's path.

> 4.  Run the GUI
> 	$ gui/xml2rfc-gui

This comes up fine, however when trying it out, I got an error for one
of my more recent drafts, which made me plug the new xml2rfc into my
draft generation makefile, which does a lot more than just run xml2rfc
-- it sets up everything needed for local processing, including
spellchecking, nits-checking, xmllint-checking and more.

Having the makefile up and running, I found this:

* running xml2rfc (the cli) with --exp produces an expanded XML file
  which lacks the <!DOCTYPE rfc SYSTEM "rfc2629.dtd"> entry which is
  needed for proper processing with xmllint -- this should probably
  be present in the expanded file.  (I fixed this temporarily in my
  copy of writers/expanded_xml.py).

> The gui will then run, invoking the system installed version of
> xml2rfc.  You'll get an import exception if either python-qt4 or
> xml2rfc are not installed.

Works.

> We have tested this process to work on fresh installs of Ubuntu 11
> and Debian 6, both 32-bit and 64-bit, and will continue to do more
> extensive testing on Fedora, openSUSE, and Mint.
> 
> Please let me know if there are any issues here in getting the GUI
> application to run with this method, and have a great weekend!

Only issue with this seems to be the cli install issue mentioned above.
Thanks!  Comments on the GUI in a separate response to your original
email.

Best regards,

	Henrik