Re: compiling the man-pages

Robert B. Easter writes:

> When I was compiling the sgml man-pages, I got some messages like:
>
> onsgmls  refentry.sgml ./ref/declare.sgml \
> | sgmlspl /usr/local/share/sgml/docbook2X/docbook2man-spec.pl --lowercase
> --section l
> onsgmls:/usr/local/share/sgml/docbook/4.1/catalog:22:0:W: DTDDECL catalog
> entries are not supported
> onsgmls:./ref/declare.sgml:256:19:X: reference to non-existent ID "SQL-BEGIN"
> onsgmls:./ref/declare.sgml:194:18:X: reference to non-existent ID "SQL-FETCH"
> onsgmls:./ref/declare.sgml:257:40:X: reference to non-existent ID
> "SQL-COMMIT-TITLE"
> onsgmls:./ref/declare.sgml:259:42:X: reference to non-existent ID
> "SQL-ROLLBACK-TITLE"
> onsgmls:./ref/declare.sgml:257:19:X: reference to non-existent ID "SQL-COMMIT"
> onsgmls:./ref/declare.sgml:259:19:X: reference to non-existent ID
> "SQL-ROLLBACK"
> onsgmls:./ref/declare.sgml:256:39:X: reference to non-existent ID
> "SQL-BEGIN-TITLE"
> onsgmls:./ref/declare.sgml:194:38:X: reference to non-existent ID
> "SQL-FETCH-TITLE"
>
> Are these messages normal or what did I miss?  I was in the doc/src/sgml
> directory and I ran "make man".  The man-pages looked ok anyway.

If you look closely (not easy to do) then you will notice that the whole
compilation process is run twice.  The first time all the cross-references
will be undefined but the links are recorded in the file manpage.refs.
The second time whenever a cross-reference is encountered the correct link
will be inserted into the file.  (This is similar to how LaTeX operates.)

So yes, it is normal to see a lot of noise like this.  You will notice,
however, that even if you run this many times the warnings/errors will not
go away completely.  This is a missing feature in the docbook2man script,
but it can be patched.  The man pages will still look okay with the
exception that occasionally where you would like something like "see also
CREATE TABLE" you will get "see also [XRef to SQL-CREATE-TABLE]".

--
Peter Eisentraut      peter_e@gmx.net       http://yi.org/peter-e/