Re: (ITS#7614) Markup error in slapd.conf.5

[hyc@symas.com]

Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> 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.
>
> Thus, one of either ignoring the .br or interpreting it as a paragraph
> boundary is exactly what doclifter *should* be doing.  This is not a
> bug, it is correct behavior because those are the only alternatives
> XML-DocBook supports.

This is absolutely ludicrous. This is like saying "my language processor 
doesn't support the Addition operator, it only supports multiplcation or 
division. So when you write 'x+y' in your input a result of either 'x*y' or 
'x/y' is *exactly* what it should be doing."

The fact that your document language or tool only supports two alternatives 
doesn't make either one of them correct.

If you hadn't caused me to waste this much time on this issue already it would 
be laughable.

-- 
   -- Howard Chu
   CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
   Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
   Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/