On Wed, 25 Sep 2013 00:07:15 +0200 Michał Górny <[email protected]> wrote:
> Dnia 2013-09-24, o godz. 23:50:20 > Tom Wijsman <[email protected]> napisał(a): > > > Principle or not, we shouldn't force our users down a particular > > way to reading them; as that's not what our meta-distribution > > stands for. > > We shouldn't either work on working for every fancy a single user may > have. If there's a real benefit from converting markdown to HTML, > please show me one. It brings them to the same structure as any other HTML documentation; if I'm going to take a complete opposite idea, we could also consider converting PDFs to HTML for people whom don't want a PDF reader or want to read the documentation on another device that doesn't even support PDF. Furthermore, HTML and CSS gives them control on how the text should be formatting; something both PDF and Markdown does not. PDF is of course not the best example, because the binary of a PDF isn't really readable to a human whereas Markdown was meant to stay readable; but I'm just saying that whereas you might not see a benefit, that doesn't mean that nobody else does. If I want to browse all documentation with a browser, just going to something like file:///usr/share/doc and read them all in the same style (using an extension like Stylebot or so); then it would be neat if Gentoo could bring them down to the same format to me, instead of that I would need to do local conversion or use multiple viewers for what could be in one canonical place. Why do I need a browser, a PDF reader and a Markdown viewer and possibly more clients to read my documentation in a formatted way? > As far as I can see it, we're either talking about: > > 1) replacing semi-readable Markdown with unreadable HTML that will > require special tools for proper display, Just some basic CSS will do just fine. > 2) installing duplicate files (the same data in markdown and in HTML), This hasn't been discussed yet; but it doesn't need to, it's the usual INSTALL_MASK story. > 3) adding some more ugly awful magic that will make binary packages > even less useful. For binary packages a choice has to be made; trying to solve things for binary packages is like discussing something to be implemented on a binary distro, you simply can't bring the usefulness we are discussing here to a binary package because of its nature. > That said, I'd rather see people using *tools* to display Markdown > rather than converting everything 90s-style. I'd rather have a single tool that displays documentation and display it really well; people are still converting things these days, they will continue to do so in the future. Some things aren't compatible. -- With kind regards, Tom Wijsman (TomWij) Gentoo Developer E-mail address : [email protected] GPG Public Key : 6D34E57D GPG Fingerprint : C165 AF18 AB4C 400B C3D2 ABF0 95B2 1FCD 6D34 E57D
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