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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org