Bug#525843: support for encoding long descriptions using a "standard" text-based markup language

[Bill Allombert <Bill.Allombert@math.u-bordeaux1.fr>]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 11:25:50PM -0700, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 05:43:01PM -0500, Manoj Srivastava wrote:
> >         Looking at the bug report, I can agree that there is a rough
> >  consensusabout using a "standard" text-based markup language to
> >  interpret package long descriptions. What is unclear, though, which of
> >  the two equivalent languages (Markdown or ReStructured Text) are being
> >  proposed here -- either one of these would be acceptable, and there are
> >  working implementations of either that seem to do a very creditable job.
> 
> >         We need to pick one or the other (and at this point, I am
> >  agnostic to whatever is picked, since either is a standard that is
> >  popular and is not a NIH spec) -- and I do not see anything claer about
> >  which one policy should support.
> 
> >         We could, as an example, go by pop-con results for the
> >  interpreters -- that is one defensible means of selecting the language,
> >  I guess.
> 
> My main concern with this request is that by blessing the use of a
> text-based markup language for lists, we not end up in a situation where
> maintainers are using more extensive markup that makes the package
> descriptions less legible as plain text.  As long as the policy language is
> precise in limiting this to list formatting, I agree that both of the
> options should do the job fine.

I agree, and I come to think that specifying explicitly in policy a small
subset of either Markdown or ReStructured Text (or preferably of the
intersection of them) as allowable for package description would be a 
safer option.

Cheers,
-- 
Bill. <ballombe@debian.org>

Imagine a large red swirl here.