Major Description
The information at
http://db.apache.org/derby/manuals/dita.html
Needs several improvements:
1) In order to successfully use Ant to build the docs with a modern environment, you must set CLASSPATH to include
avalon-framework-4.2.0.jar fop.jar batik-all-1.6.jar
from the docs/trunk/lib directory, as in:
CLASSPATH=/docs/trunk/lib/fop.jar:/docs/trunk/lib/avalon-framework-4.2.0.jar:/docs/trunk/lib/batik-all-1.6.jar ant html.ref
The documentation notes that you must do this "For PDF output", but
in fact you have to do this for any sort of docs build, even html output.
Otherwise you get a failed build, with mysterious error messages about how the Xerces parsers cannot be found in the CLASSPATH. Note that the jars that you are adding to the CLASSPATH aren't the same as the xercesImpl and xml-apis jars that are in trunk/lib, so there is some strange mystery here that I don't understand, but modifying CLASSPATH in this way allows the doc build to work.
2) If you are working on Fedora, or on another platform where the system 'svn' executable uses LIBMAGIC, then you need to specify an alternate subversion/config file in your home directory to ensure that the svn eol style is correct when you are adding new files to subversion with svn add. On my Fedora system, this worked:
*.dita = svn:mime-type=text/xml;svn:eol-style=native *.ditamap = svn:mime-type=text/xml;svn:eol-style=native