solaris /dev/console patch

[Havoc Pennington]

John (J5) Palmieri wrote:
> 
> The biggest problem with the XML parser is the validation which is one
> big fragile logic statement.  Every time an option is added one must go
> into that statement and figure out where to add the || FOO_OPTION's or
> && FOO_OPTION's and where one must completely restructure the logic.  At
> least that is what I remember when writing the at_console patch.  Using
> a DTD and validating parser would have been better but I don't even
> think we actually work with libxml anymore and on Red Hat/Fedora at we
> have move moved d-bus into /bin and /lib which would mean libxml would
> have to be moved to /lib (expat is right now) in order to switch.
>  

Eh, I don't really believe that would be better anyway; it'd just be 
less obviously complicated (largely because a bunch of validation would 
get punted or missed), not necessarily less complicated. DTDs are in my 
experience extremely hard to write correctly, and few people (including 
me) really understand them. Custom validation code usually has better 
error messages, too.

Not to say that DTDs are useless just that I don't really see them as a 
substitute for sanity-check code in a lot of cases.

Havoc