[Haskell-cafe] Hackage package "synopsis" sections

[Jonathan Paugh]

On 09/15/2014 06:27 PM, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote:
> On 09/15/2014 11:54 PM, Jonathan Paugh wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Using Markdown would be a great idea. And, if Haddock were to support
>> Markdown, and packages were migrated gradually to that, the
>> inconsistency would disappear (eventually).
>>
>> IIRC, adding Markdown to Hadock was suggested on this list before, and
>> the major argument against it was that Markdown didn't have a standard.
>> Now, it has one, called CommonMark[1]. Barring any (further) copyright
>> issues with the name, that looks to be a great step forward for Markdown.
>>
>> [1]: http://commonmark.org
>>
>> Regards,
>> Jonathan Paugh
>>
>
> It was more than proposed, it was the original plan of my GSOC in 2013.
> In the end it went into a different direction because after actually
> hacking on Haddock I came to the conclusion that Markdown was actually
> not a good idea. You can find reasons in café archives I'm sure.

Okay, thanks for the correction & info.

> There is also the question of
> who's going to maintain it.
Now, that would be a bigger obstacle than any technical ones.

Also, there's the fact that CommonMark hasn't been vetted by the
community at large, yet. In case it changes any, this might be a bad
time to base a core Haskell component on it. (Aside from these
obstacles, I'm all for it!)

>  We are severely understaffed. Haddock has
> only two maintainers, Simon Hengel and myself and Simon tends to be
> quite busy so it's mostly myself, and I also have about a billion
> projects I want to spend time on. I don't want to maintain another
> parser, there are more important things to hack. Honestly, it's sad that
> such a core project is so understaffed.
Thanks for all your hard work!
>
> Alas, complaining is not my main aim here. I simply want to point out
> that after some work, the Haddock parser and the required types now
> don't depend on GHC or any other libs that don't ship (bar for internal
> attoparsec dependency) with the compiler. This means that recent Pandoc
> now has both reader and writer modules for Haddock which means you can
> go Haddock <=> Markdown if you wish and get some results. I have not
> tried it myself however. Incidentally, implementing such reader/writer
> Pandoc modules was my initial submission in 2013.
>
> In summary, if you really want to write Markdown instead of Haddock, use
> pandoc to convert between the two. I really wonder if the hassle is
> worth it though.
>

Regards,
Jonathan Paugh