RFC: Description text in packages

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2008-12-16 at 17:25 -0500, Alan Cox wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 04:20:07PM -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> > 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 ?
> 
> You have confused character encoding and semantic markup.
> 
> Unicode is character encoding
> 
> HTML tags or similar are semantic markup

Thanks Alan, I know that quite well. 

> Trying to extrapolate semantic markup from random ascii symbols is not
> a reliable or robust path, particularly when you come to internationalise
> things.

One hopes the ascii symbols in most package descriptions are not
entirely random... and extrapolating something from them can be quite
reliable if is there is a mutual understanding about the interpretation.
Hence my reference to markdown.

> Possibly, however package data in rpm headers is not wiki markdown and the
> specification for RPM doesn't imply you can treat it that way.

The specification for RPM doesn't imply anything about the description
field. And this thread is about how to possibly improve the situation by
agreeing on some form of interpretation.