The Environment

Up to SuSE Release 8.0 the SGML-catalog-files being installed into $SGML_ROOT by several SGML and XML related packages had to be made accessible in the shell environment. From Release 8.1 on this should not be done any more because it might lead to problems using the different docu tools.

Cause of the trouble is the intermixture of SGML and XML catalog files in the same directory $SGML_ROOT. SGML-tools might have problems to handle the XML-catalogs and XML-tools tend to stumble over the SGML-catalogs. In fact this solution for intermixed SGML-XML-environments has been kind of a hack ever since and there are currently attempts in the Linux world to clean this up a bit. XML-related data for the XSLT-parser is now held in a new directory /etc/xml and this might be adopted by other tools too.

Consequently the docbook-toys referenced in this document are using some clever lookup of catalog files to get things right dynamically, so there is no need to set up a special environment.

Note: If your environment already is configured the "old way", unset $SGML_CATALOG_FILES if you are using SuSE 8.1 or above. Nevertheless $SGML_ROOT should be set as shown below as it doesn't cause any problems (apparently).

For the whole SGML-machinery to function properly the environment variable $SGML_ROOT has to be set correctly. This is best be done in the respective rc-file of the shell used, e.g. for the bash:

	  #
	  # SGML environment
	  #

	  export SGML_ROOT=/usr/share/sgml