RFC: Description text in packages

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 21:21 +0100, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

> We expect you to convert this syntax to correct plain text in UTF-8
> encoding before publication by Fedora. This is the common ground all our
> package manipulating tools understand and there is no way we're going to
> teach them some other markup just because you can't find some UTF-8
> symbol in your layout.
>
> If you can't write UTF-8 bullets, and can't be bothered to launch
> something like gucharmap, use a sed of awk or whatever converter on your
> spec files before pushing them Fedora-side, don't ask others to add code
> to many tools to workaround your problems.

So how does using untypable unicode bullets magically tell PackageKit
that this is part of a list ? And which of the many bullet-like
characters in Unicode do you want to bless for this ?

If you ask me, something very simple like
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown is best for situations like this
where you want to include light markup into text without letting the
markup totally overwhelm the surrounding document.