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/)