[Kommander-devel] Re: [Quanta] How does checkXML work?

[Eric Laffoon]

On Sunday 03 July 2005 3:58 am, Andras Mantia wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Sunday 03 July 2005 13:25, Carsten Niehaus wrote:
> > I clicked on the action "checkXML" and got the confirmation the "The
> > checkXML-script started". No matter what I do in the dialog: when I
> > click on "Validate" it takes about half a second and then the dialog
> > is back in the state it was on start. Nothing happed, no
> > debug-messages on the shell from where I started Quanta, nothing in
> > the messages tab.
>
> Good catch and good question.

These were done by Chris some time ago and as I haven't done that much XML doc 
work lately I hadn't looked at them. First of all Chris' work was reasonably 
good for a first try, but less than exemplary, and it was geared for the 
first release of Kommander when it was essentially a static dialog.

I've been looking at the dialog and found that it really needs to be 
redesigned, but there seems to be real problems with how it handles 
processes.
>
> > Now my question is: Did I do something wrong? Am I misunderstanding
> > how the tool is supposed to work? Is this tool not working? I tested
> > on two different PCs, both KDE 3.4.
>
> There seems to be some problem. The tool (the Kommander dialog)
> generates the correct line for xmllint, and tries to execute
> xmllint --nout --valid path_to_the_current_file

Is this transformed somewhere? I've got it doing checkXML path/filename.
>
> If I execute this line in a terminal, it is OK. For some reasons it
> seems to be not executed from inside Kommander, so Quanta never gets
> back the result of xmllint.

There is also a new console widget. However this seems academic. I get a 
different result from different parsers...
* Internal parser returns 
Trying checkXML /home/eric/kommander/kommander-docs/index.docbook
* old parser returns absolutely nothing

I don't know where the "Trying checkXML" message is coming from. Michal would 
know if this is a Kommander message. I need to look at some other things 
because it looks as if we are having a problem at least here with console and 
this is the first time I've noticed.

> I'm CC-ing this mail to the Kommander list, maybe Michal has an idea
> what is happening, because something is definitely wrong there and it
> doesn't seem to be Quanta, as the xmllint result is not printed even if
> I run the Kommander dialog from a konsole.
>
> Andras

Okay, I just looked at my new dialog with shell commands like ls and sure 
enough they still work fine. I also noted the xmllint produces vastly 
superior output to checkXML. So my conclusion is that something really 
strange is going on here. xmllint is a binary file so there should not be 
some accidental decoupling of stdout by multiple processes. Is this GNOME 
software? Maybe we should look for "break Kommander" comments. Just 
kidding. ;-) This is really weird. I wonder if xmllint does something weird 
with stdout? Michal and Andras, do you have any ideas? I'm happy to deliver a 
new dialog if I could just get it to work.
-- 
Eric Laffoon
Project Lead - kdewebdev module