[Python-Dev] Docutils/reStructuredText is ready to process PEPs

[Guido van Rossum]

> I made this suggestion privately to David, but I'll repeat it here.
> I'd be willing to accept that PEPs /may/ be written in reST as an
> alternative to plaintext, but not require it.  I'd like for PEP
> authors to explicitly choose one or the other, preferrably by file
> extension (e.g. .txt for plain text .rst or .rest for reST).  I'd also
> like for there to be two tools for generation derivative forms from
> the original source.

AFAICT that's all that David asked for.  It's the only thing that
makes sense; nobody's going to convert over 200 existing PEPs to reST.

> I would leave pep2html.py alone.  That's the tool that generates .html
> from .txt.  I'd write a different tool that took a .rst file and
> generated both a .html file and a .txt file.  The generated .txt file
> would have no markup and would conform to .txt PEP style as closely as
> possible.  reST generated html would then have a link both to the
> original reST source, and to the plain text form.

I don't see why reST needs to produce .txt output.  The reST source is
readable enough.

> A little competition never hurt anyone. :)  So I'd open it up and let
> PEP authors decide, and we can do a side-by-side comparison of which
> format folks prefer to use.

Exactly.  Let's do it.

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)