Subject: Re: bug#31803: Problems in chroot.2, ln.1, test.1, [.1

From: "Eric S. Raymond" <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 14 Jun 2018 16:24:48 -0400

Paul Eggert <[email-masked]>:
> OK, I installed the attached. Though in hindsight I wonder, can't doclifter
> see that the brackets are bolded, and so are literals instead of being
> metanotation? (Can't hurt to ask...)

It's a perfectly reasonable question and I would probably be asking it myself
in your shoes.

Unfortunately, use of highlighting in these synopses is so inconsistent (and
in some cases downright perverse) that I had to give up trying to back out
syntactic/semantic info from it.  Too many false positives from very
reasonable-sounding rules like yours.

This is one aspect of The Problem With Synopses - which is definitely
the biggest single pain in my ass by far about parsing man-page tag
soup. What can be in a Synopsis section is not standardized anywhere,
and governed only by tradition.  DocBook-XML does a pretty good job of
capturing a large subset of that tradition in a subset of its DTD, but
is necessarily unable to express lots of edge cases other than by
treating them as unstrucured text.

Doing that, of course, defeats the point of the semantic markup.  So I
fight a constant uphill battle to improve the parser.  Been working on
this for 17 years and have my residuals down to a hair less than 2% of
the man-page corpus, but it's what I've elsewhere called a Zeno tarpit:

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6772
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		<a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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