Bug#525843: support for encoding long descriptions using a "standard" text-based markup language
Package: debian-policy
Version: 3.8.1.0
Severity: wishlist
[ submitting bug report as requested at http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2009/04/msg00155.html ]
Andreas Tille, has recently (re-)raised the issue of consistent
formatting of lists in long descriptions [1,2].
[1] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/03/msg01165.html
[2] http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/04/msg00757.html
>From the discussion, it emerged that there is rough consensus (or at
least it seems so to some of the participants, including myself and
Manoj) about using a "standard" text-based markup language to
interpret package long descriptions. Technically, the 2 mentioned
solutions have been Markdown [3] and ReStructured Text [4]. With both
of them, the idea is that *current* long descriptions are already
processable as if they were in that format, with very few exceptions.
[3] http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/
[4] http://docutils.sourceforge.net/rst.html
Implementations have been proposed already, in the form of tools that
process packages long descriptions and output their corresponding
rendered HTML format. In particular, 2 implementations have been
presented for Markdown already: one by Andreas [5] and one by me [6].
[5] http://lists.debian.org/debian-policy/2009/04/msg00146.html
[6] http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-python-debian/python-debian.git;a=blob_plain;f=examples/deb822/render-dctrl;hb=HEAD
Additionally, a weekly-generated archive of all long descriptions
rendered with Markdown is now available at:
http://upsilon.cc/~zack/stuff/longdesc-mdwn/ .
It is based on [6] above.
Cheers.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.29-1-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
debian-policy depends on no packages.
debian-policy recommends no packages.
Versions of packages debian-policy suggests:
ii doc-base 0.9.1 utilities to manage online documen
-- no debconf information
Reply to: