On Thu, Apr 16, 2009 at 12:50:12PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote: > I think we need to enumerate some goals for this proposed > change. Here is a start: > > - Minimal disruption for current packages. The impact should be > measured by numbers of packages impacted <snip> > At this point, I would say that Markdown/Resstructued text meets > most of the goals above, as long as we restrict the markup to the > list above: I agree with the goals and thanks for "resetting" the discussion on their grounds. According to the goals you pointed out, it looks like that Markdown would be a more than suitable choice in terms of availability of implementations, matching of "mail-like" markup (which is actually one of the design goal of the language), and minimal disruption. [ Markdown would also be my choice in term of personal tastes. Not that it matters, but I mention it to it make clear which is my "church" in this respect :) ] However, markdown would not be directly applicable to the content of the long description field, as a RFC822 parser would give you, due to '.'s used as paragraph separators. Sure the needed pre-processing to fix that would be trivial, but it is *some kind* of pre-processing. One can then wonder to which extent we would allow pre-processing before the markup processor without considering that need a "disruption" of current long descriptions. I just felt like pointing that out, because it can put back into play some other language which can be considered "non disrupting" by allowing some extra pre-processing bits. ... nevertheless I completely agree that something like Markdown + the minimal paragraph separator pre-processing looks like a completely reasonable implementation plan. Out of curiosity, would restructured text be immune to this problem? Cheers. -- Stefano Zacchiroli -o- PhD in Computer Science \ PostDoc @ Univ. Paris 7 zack@{upsilon.cc,pps.jussieu.fr,debian.org} -<>- http://upsilon.cc/zack/ Dietro un grande uomo c'è ..| . |. Et ne m'en veux pas si je te tutoie sempre uno zaino ...........| ..: |.... Je dis tu à tous ceux que j'aime
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature