XML Catalog Manager (xmlcatmgr in its short form) is a small utility used to manipulate SGML and XML catalogs. It is extremely small and lightweight, specially designed to be run from packaging systems. Basically, it allows adding and removing entries from catalogs, in a completely automated way.
A catalog is a lookup mechanism used to translate entities into other different entities. They can, for example, map public identifiers to local files or URIs. This allows you to tell the parser where to look for entities without having to modify the original document source.
This program was initially created to manage catalog files within pkgsrc, the NetBSD package system. As such a program is required by very simple packages (DTD's, for example), we needed an utility that did not rely on big libraries nor programs to keep a small dependancy tree. xmlcatmgr is now completely integrated with many pkgsrc packages and is doing a good job.
As xmlcatmgr is not a NetBSD specific utility, this project was born to make it available to everybody. As a result, the FreeBSD project adopted it for its own ports system.
Latest stable version is 2.2, released on 1st September 2004. Click here to go to the downloads section.
For a list of major changes between versions, click here.
You can get a copy of the latest development sources using CVS. Issue the following set of commands to get them for the first time:
$ mkdir xmlcatmgr
$ cd xmlcatmgr
$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@xmlcatmgr.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xmlcatmgr login
$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@xmlcatmgr.cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/xmlcatmgr co -P src
To keep up to date:
$ cd xmlcatmgr/src
$ cvs -z3 -q update -dP
Additionally, you can browse the CVS repository online.