Re: Consistent formating long descriptions as input data (Was: RFC: Better formatting for long descriptions)
Don Armstrong wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Apr 2009, Andreas Tille wrote:
>> Moreover I see no reason to bind anybody to a certain library like
>> markdown.
>
> It's perfectly ok to punt the specification of the format to an
> external library, at least initially. If enough people don't want to
> use the markdown libraries, they'll either code up patches to policy
> to codify the equivalent of markdown formatting in policy or write
> equivalent code to markdown.
As shown before in the other thread, markdown does not work with
the current long description : it needs pre-processing to add some
blank lines before each list.
So, I see Andreas proposition has a way to formalize what we want
to accept (that will allow most current long description to be good)
in order to be able to send them with a preprocessor to tools such
as markdown.
> It seems to me like the next step is to go ahead and make a few
> patches to packages.debian.org to change to a markdown (or equivalent)
> formatting of the long description with whatever pre-processing is
> necessary, see how well it works, submit a patch to policy to codify,
> and move on with filing bugs for those bits that don't work properly.
No current tools¹ works with current long descriptions.
If we add some preprocessor, I think we will hit the reason why, for
example, markdown requires this additional blank line. This means that
we will not support all what markdown support. It is not a problem but
it means that markdown specifications can not be used "as it".
Regards,
Vincent
¹: at least, I did not notice one in this discussion
--
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