Re: [Tools-discuss] bibxml3 database reload frequency

[Carsten Bormann <[e-mail]>]

On 2020-08-21, at 00:24, Kent Watsen <[e-mail]> wrote:
> 
> It worked, and then it didn’t. 

Yes.  One of the features and bugs of uploading XML is that you rely on the server-side XML2RFC to do your processing for you.  Here it seems, that still had -17 in its cache.

The kramdown-rfc process has a setting, “stand_alone: true”, which asks kramdown-rfc to resolve any external nreferences.  This is what I recommend people to use.  (It is not the default only because kramdown-rfc tries to support the long document development times typical for the IETF by being insanely backwards-compatible.)

To get the same level of assurance out of XML authoring, you need to prep the XML before uploading.

	xml2rfc --preptool foo.xml

You then have a foo.prepped.xml that you can upload.
(This step is also needed with any local references to SVG, source-code etc.)

Note that prepping means the uploaded XML is less useful for the RFC editor.
So, ironically, despite the switch to XML uploading, you will want to provide an unprepped XML, as well as all the locally referenced files, to the RFC editor -- even though the approved, but prepped, XML is in the I-D repository.
But this is irrelevant during the document development process up to approval.

Ultimately, I hope that xml2rfc gains a reference resolution function that does not involve all the preptool processing.  For now, prepping it is.

Grüße, Carsten