On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 06:38:59PM -0500, sean finney <seanius@debian.org> was heard to say: > On Mon, Dec 12, 2005 at 03:09:52PM -0800, Daniel Burrows wrote: > > The attached text is a first draft of a proposed extension to the > > Description field to explicitly handle bulleted lists. The extended > > wow! that's quite a document. i'm glad to see that people are > focusing on the Really Big problems facing debian today. > > okay, that was a bit punchy... sorry i couldn't help it :) > > seriously though, i think the proposal is quite well written. the only > critique i have is that i think it's maybe going a little too far out > there to talk about nested lists, as i can't imagine them being at all > practical in what's supposed to be a short, informative description of > a package. That's a fair point, but I felt that there wasn't any reason to artificially restrict the sorts of lists that could be handled when nested lists can be dealt with in such a natural fashion. There are at least a few cases where I can imagine two-level lists being useful, and they seem to exist in the wild (see samhain and xml-core, for instance). One interesting question that I can see is whether to treat a *word-wrapped* line that starts with a bullet character as a bulleted item. Doing so would make several more natural ways of expressing lists work, especially nested lists -- the example in my document is actually wrong! On the other hand, doing this at the top-level would mean that conforming descriptions wouldn't degrade cleanly, while doing it only for sub-lists is inelegant. Daniel
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