What I'm going to do: Was: RFC: Description text in packages

[Toshio Kuratomi]

Richard Hughes wrote:
> On Wed, 2008-12-17 at 09:31 -0800, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
>> PackageKit is, of course, your baby
> 
> No, it's an upstream project where we try to work with al the distros to
> solve a common problem. It's certainly not my baby.
> 
In that case, you're going to have a lot of problems with adding
Markdown in PackageKit upstream.  I doubt heavily that we'll be able to
get people within Fedora to agree to format their %descriptions as
markdown let alone the larger community of distributions.  I've already
mentioned reStructuredText which is popular in the python community and
preformatted text (whether ASCii or utf-8) is also going to have adherents.

>> but you're trying to add formatting
>> to a field that doesn't have any formatting rules inside Fedora or
>> cross-distro.
> 
> Right. And I think markdown in spec files and update descriptions makes
> perfect sense. If the text doesn't have such formatting, or it's
> invalid, PK will just return the text with no processing.
> 
The problem is that Markdown and other non-intrusive formats (like
reStructuredText) don't have enough information to tell if it's
"invalid".  For instance, if my Bodhi comments have:

# Fix an issue with char *foobar and all void* on gcc-5
# Fix call to __init__ in python bindings.

Markdown will mangle what I intended because there are three constructs
in there that look like valid Markdown.

To use a non-intrusive format, we need to specify the format being used
either in a specification or as metadata to the %description tag.  Both
of those solutions would have to be hashed out with the rpm authors.

-Toshio

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