On 3 May 2016 at 14:18, Fred Drake <fred@fdrake.net> wrote:
My perspective, for what it's worth, is that while I find Markdown a horrible pain, there are a lot of people who pick it up before picking up Python, and tools like GitHub and BitBucket encourage (and make it easier to add) README.md to a project. For someone who isn't familiar with reStructuredText, it's an easier on-ramp.
So while I'm all for encouraging developers to prefer reStructuredText, I'm in favor of supporting Markdown as a long_description format. The format for a README file just doesn't seem such a big deal that alienating potential community members is worth it.
Agreed. And like it or not, people get familiar with Markdown from things like github comment boxes, so it's very easy to just "go with the familiar option". Having said that, someone still needs to do the work to add Markdown support - and that's not trivial, as it will involve changes to how the metadata is held to include a content type for the long_description. And that means a discussion on how to include that. So while I don't mind if people want this support, it's not going to happen unless someone actually goes through the work of managing the proposal, co-ordinating the discussions, writing the code, etc. And I suspect that this is unlikely to be a priority of any of the PyPA team in the near future - so it'll need someone who's interested in seeing this feature added to take on that work. Paul