Each of these would send a user down a path Vale does not support:
Core options placed under a glob header are not scoped to that glob — Vale
rejects them with E201, so the guidance to nest them produced a config that
will not load. The built-in `Vale` style is compiled in, but Vale still
requires StylesPath to exist on disk before it will run, so the "no StylesPath
needed" shortcut fails. The MDX guidance was inverted: under `[formats]
mdx = md` the mapping is what makes MDX lint at all, and it needs the mdx2vast
prerequisite that was never mentioned. And a spelling rule's `ignore` paths
resolve against StylesPath, not against the rule file's own directory, so the
documented relative paths silently matched nothing.
Gotcha 1 said a style in BasedOnStyles that is not built-in and not
already under StylesPath "finds nothing until vale sync fetches it — a
clean run is not proof anything linted". Reproduced against vale 3.15.2:
that case is a hard `E100 [loadStyles] style '<name>' does not exist on
StylesPath`, exit 2. Nothing is linted and nothing is silent.
Worse, the same commit deleted the Gotcha that was the actual diagnostic —
that Packages and BasedOnStyles are separate keys and a style lints only
once it is in both. So the surviving rule sent a reader staring at E100 to
run `vale sync`, which fetches only what Packages declares and reports
"Synced 0 package(s)" against a BasedOnStyles-only name. The remediation
loop did not terminate. Reproduced end to end.
The genuinely silent case is the reverse — declared in Packages and
synced, but absent from BasedOnStyles — and it is now the one labelled as
such. Testing also turned up that StylesPath must exist as a directory
even when Vale is the only style (E201, exit 2), which was documented
nowhere.
references/configuration-reference.md gains a seven-row resolution matrix,
each row backed by a fixture. Its Frontmatter Scopes section claimed
provenance from the vale.sh research corpus, which contains no frontmatter
material at all; it is house-verified and now says so under its own slug.
Issue #99's wave-3 comment recorded this defect as found and repaired. It
was not — the file was byte-identical to the commit that introduced it, so
nothing here was treated as already correct.
Refs #99
Description 657 -> 244 chars, body 504 -> 342 words, Gotchas 50% -> 24%.
The 50% was the worst ratio in the corpus and a real inverted body, not
the denominator artefact the ratio usually flags: half the body was a
Gotchas section doing duty as reference material.
A clean-context audit caught the split leaving a false statement behind.
Gotcha 1's kernel lost the qualifier that only package styles need
fetching, so it asserted that any style vale sync has not fetched fails
-- contradicting the same file twice, since the built-in Vale style and
any committed custom style are never fetched. An agent adding a custom
style would have added a spurious Packages entry and broken vale sync
outright. The qualifier is restored in the body rather than behind a
fourth reference pointer.
Also corrects the moved fixture's framing, which tabulated a control row
under a heading claiming it came from a multi-line fixture.
Refs #99
