Eric S. Raymond wrote: > Howard Chu <[email protected]>: >> OK, I ran Docbook 4.5 on the output from doclifter and I see it's >> complaining on one line of slapd.conf.5.xml. It appears doclifter is >> misinterpreting the .br request. Instead of inserting a line break >> it is either ignoring it completely or doing a paragraph break. >> >> I'm going to reject your submitted patch because it is not the >> minimal patch needed to fix the error, nor is the error actually in >> our manpage source, it is in the doclifter tool. > > You have drastically misunderstood what you saw. This isn't an error > in doclifter, it's a result of a basic ontological mismatch between > the source and target markups that doclifter tries to bridge across. > > There are no line breaks in DocBook's XML, structure-oriented world. > The closest thing to one ia special-purpose <sbr/> tag that is only valid > inside command synoposes. Thus there is no "line break" equivalent > that .br can be mapped to. Nor should there be; that is fundamentally > a presentation-level concept.
A line-break may well be only a presentation-level concept, but it is also something that a document author explicitly chooses to insert. A tool (or markup language) that ignores an author's explicit wishes is a broken tool. > My patch adds the structural information required for doclifter to > get traction. The requirement for this is rare, and getting more so > as man page maintainers clean up their sources. Please be part of > that solution rather than part of the problem. Your solution is broken or unfit for the purpose if it cannot process simple and correct manpage source. -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/
