DOCBOOK-APPS: Problems with ANT and DocBook

[Marc Palmer <marc@anyware.co.uk>]

Hi,

I don't know if anybody else is using Apache ANT to build DocBook output... 
but I've been doing it successfully for a while now, as part of a "tool 
chain" to produce PDF with Apache FOP - all via ANT.

However I have found a strange problem. I cannot get it to process more 
than one docbook XML document at a time, using ANT's <style> task.

If I allow multiple XML files in the file set used by <style> then the 
second one always fails, with some spurious problem in docbook's i10n.xsl:

html:
    [style] Transforming into D:\contracts\possio\px\docs\SpecDocs\output
    [style] Processing 
D:\contracts\possio\px\docs\SpecDocs\documents\platform-a
rch.xml to D:\contracts\possio\px\docs\SpecDocs\output\platform-arch.html
    [style] Loading stylesheet D:\contracts\possio\px\docs\tools\docbook- 
xsl-1.5
1.1\html\possio-docbook.xsl
    [style] Processing 
D:\contracts\possio\px\docs\SpecDocs\documents\platform-b
undles.xml to D:\contracts\possio\px\docs\SpecDocs\output\platform- 
bundles.html
    [style] D:/contracts/possio/px/docs/tools/docbook-xsl- 
1.51.1/common/l10n.xsl
:86:76: Fatal Error! Unknown error in XPath Cause: 
java.lang.NullPointerExceptio
n
    [style] : Fatal Error! Fatal error during transformation Cause: Fatal 
error
during transformation
    [style] Failed to process 
D:\contracts\possio\px\docs\SpecDocs\documents\pla
tform-bundles.xml

The first file (platform-arch.xml) builds to HTML fine usind DocBook XSL, 
but the second file dies straight away.

This implies that something is not being "reset" between XSL processing of 
the files - whether this is a problem with my use of the <style> task, a 
problem with Docbook, or a problem with ANT I do not know.

Any clues?

Thanks in advance,
Marc
-- 
Marc Palmer (Wangjammer5)
http://www.wangjammers.org
Java Consultants