DOCBOOK-APPS: srcdir/objdir issues and including variable usabilityissues with xsltproc

[John Levon <levon at movementarian dot org>]

I've found this stuff to be entirely impenetrable. Is there some good
reason why a sensible, simple include and variable substitution system
isn't available ?

Here is my setup. I have a tarball which contains a docbook .xml document
and some small .xsl files (which I need as the standard docbook files do
not produce valid XHTML output). Now, I would like to do the following
things :

1) Allow build when srcdir != objdir
2) Set some of the text in the document (release version)
3) Don't hard-code the path to the docbook files
4) Don't require users to alter their environment

This seems to be close to impossible for a naive user (me). Isn't
anybody worried about this ?

Here's what I currently have :

All the .xsl files are .in and output by autoconf. This is ugly
obviously and should be compeltely unnecessary. This modifies the
xsl:import paths as necessary, and sets a apply-template appropriately for
the release version variable mentioned above

Now, this means I cannot include the release version in, say, <title>
because the docbook template seems to override my one. I cannot use
--stringparam to set the path to the xsl files (docbooks and mine)
because it does not work in xsl:import, it seems (or xsl:include). I
cannot use xi:include because I cannot get it to work with xsltproc
--include at all, (and furthermore, it *fails* *silently* !!). It also
doesn't work with params, that is :

<xsl:param name="srcdir"/>
<xi:include href="$srcdir/xsl/xhtml-non.xsl" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude"; />

So my questions are :

1) (general point) why is this so hard ? Where is xsltproc -I and xsltproc -D ?
2) (specific point) how do I do it ?

Examples in particular are appreciated. In case it's relevant :
[moz at lambent shared]$ rpm -qf `which xsltproc`
libxslt-1.0.19-1
and xsl-stylesheets-1.50.0-3

My attempts to find explanations and help generally end up pointing to
the standards, which is not far off line noise for me.

thanks,
john