[Distutils] Basic Markdown Readme Support

[Paul Moore]

On 3 May 2016 at 14:18, Fred Drake <fred at 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