DOCBOOK-APPS: file path peculiarity with xinclude

[Lisa Carey <lisa dot carey at havok dot com>]

Hi list,

I have a number of existing docbook documents, and was hoping to use
xinclude to join them together into a larger book as described in Bob's
helpful guide.  Each of the documents includes some external files as system
entities.

When I used Elliotte Rusty Harold's xinclude java app to try and resolve the
xincludes in my master book document, it mysteriously couldn't seem to find
the system entities.  Further investigation revealed that it was looking for
each of these external files one level up from their actual location in the
file system.  So, for instance, if the file was at C:\foo\bar\myfile.xml, it
would look for it as foo\myfile.xml.

The xinclude app was run in the same directory as all of the docs to be
xincluded - this was the directory that it seemed to be "skipping" when
looking for the entity files ("bar" in the above example).  If I change the
entity declarations in the subdocuments to point to the "wrong" location,
the files are found - however, this means that I can't generate any output
directly from the subdocuments without changing the entity declarations back
again.

Did I do something wrong? Should I try using another xinclude application?
Do I need to <shudder> replace all the system entities in my subdocuments
with xincludes? Any explanations/help gratefully recieved.

cheers,

Lisa