On Wed, 2003-11-26 at 01:51, Patrick B�rjesson wrote: > When doing an update world I saw that something wanted to drag in lynx > to my system, so I did an 'etcat -d lynx' to see what could have caused > portage to think that I needed lynx. The result showed me some packages, > but the only one I had installed was docbook-sgml-utils, so I took a > look at the ebuild for it. In the last row of DEPEND I saw "|| ( > net-www/lynx net-www/links )" which I take means that either lynx OR > links have to be installed... This is strange in itself as docbook > shouldn't need a browser to be installed, or? Anyway... I already have > links installed so why does docbook-utils want me to install lynx? > > Patrick B�rjesson
Hi Patrick (apologies for the off-list reply), Currently, docbook-sgml-utils requires either lynx, or links to output in text format. If you'd like to check this, have a look at the 'txt' backend (in /usr/share/sgml/docbook/utils-0.6.12/backends), near the top you'll see the CONVERT logic. You can also try removing (emerge -C) lynx and links and then converting a docbook sgml file with docbook2txt, and see it error out. I did think about this long and hard, whether it was too 'heavy' and dependency, and had a look (in the days when time permitted) at modifying the txt backend to use html2text. According to the TODO in the source archive, this is a planned addition to docbook-sgml-utils, at which time neither console browser will be required for the txt backend (although, of course, could still be used). I consider conversion to plain text a fairly standard function, which is broken unless a 'real' backend is provided by lynx or links. So I guess in answer to your question 'docbook shouldnt need a browser to be installed?', it actually does need a console browser backend at the moment, although hopefully an html2text backend will be available in the future. Hope that clears things up, Mike. -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list
