On 13/05/2009 19:53, Donnie Jones wrote:

Hello Dan,

Best place to ask is glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org since that is the GHC users list. I have CC'd your email to the GHC user list.

Cheers. -- Donnie Jones

On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 1:35 PM, Dan wrote:

...

Hi,

Not sure if this is the right place to ask. GHC 6.10.3 source dist: ./configure takes about 10 minutes to look for DocBook DTD and another 10 to look for DocBook XSL directory. I was writing this e-mail thinking it had completely crashed. Any reason why it's so ridiculously slow? A look at 'top' says the CPU is mostly idle during this time, but xmllint is running.

I have the following complaint from Roman in my inbox, which I think is about the same thing:

one big nuisance when building ghc is that configure tries to connect to the internet. The culprit is the FP_GEN_DOCBOOK_XML macro in aclocal.m4 which is used when checking for DocBook DTD. It generates an XML file which references http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/xml/4.2 /docbookx.dtd and then runs xmllint which, naturally, wants to load the dtd. Depending on the quality of my internet connection and on the availability of oasis-open.org this check sometimes (infrequently but very annoyingly) takes up to a 2 or 3 minutes for me. Given that the DTD in question can be freely copied, why not redistribute it with ghc?

Another www reference is in FP_GEN_FO (to http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format) but that never seems to bite me.

I know almost but not quite exactly nothing about how to find DTDs. But I do recall that Duncan mentioned to me recently that there's a much better way to do this - Duncan? Cheers, Simon