Re: MacOS: xsltproc fails with "warning: failed to load external entity"

Aleksander Alekseev <aleksander(at)timescale(dot)com> writes:
>> For either sets of tools, the automatic download option doesn't appear
>> to work anymore. This probably has to do with either the https or the
>> redirects that have been mentioned.

> Peter, thanks for reporting this. I got the same results: neither
> tools work without setting XML_CATALOG_FILES and setting this
> environment variable work for both Homebrew and macOS versions.

> Here is the summary of our findings. PFA the updated patch v2.

It's worse than that: I find that

export XML_CATALOG_FILES=/dev/null

breaks the docs build on RHEL8 and Fedora 37 (latest) too, with the
same "failed to load external entity" symptom. I conclude from this
that there is no version of xsltproc anywhere that can still download
the required files automatically. So we need to take out the advice
that says you can rely on auto-download for everybody, not just macOS.

If this is indeed the case, perhaps we ought to start inserting --nonet
into the invocations. There's not much use in allowing these tools to
perform internet access when the best-case scenario is that they fail.
(Worst-case, you could end up getting hacked, perhaps?)

regards, tom lane