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.