[darcs-users] Converting MoinMoin to Markdown/RST

Tue Jan 27 01:31:51 UTC 2009

Gwern Branwen <gwern0 at gmail.com> writes:

>> I'm not impressed by markdown, but by all accounts pandoc (and thus
>> gitit) has an extended markdown implementation and a crippled reST
>> implementation, so within the scope of gitit, I guess the difference is
>> not so staggering.
>
> I dunno how crippled the RST is (I wouldn't expect it to be too
> crippled since it's so close to Markdown), but it's a reasonable
> subset - I didn't see any of the DWN RST files break horribly when I
> looked via Pandoc.

Well just as a simple example, I'm not aware of any standard[0] markdown
equivalent to recognize the use of metadata in the document prelude and
propagate to the output document, e.g.:

    $ rst2pdf | with-temp-file pdfinfo
    Tron: The Musical
    =================

    :Author: Alan Bradley
    :Date: Fri, 15 Jan 1988 12:22:22 +1100

    Main content
    ^D

Emits:

    Title:          Tron: The Musical
    Subject:        (unspecified)
    Keywords:
    Author:         Alan Bradley
    Producer:       ReportLab http://www.reportlab.com
    CreationDate:   Tue Jan 27 12:22:50 2009
    Tagged:         no
    Pages:          1
    Encrypted:      no
    Page size:      595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4)
    File size:      3427 bytes
    Optimized:      no
    PDF version:    1.3

Running the same input through "rst2html | sed -n '/<head>/,/<style/p'":

    <head>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <meta name="generator" content="Docutils 0.5:
    http://docutils.sourceforge.net/" />
    <title>Tron: The Musical</title>
    <meta name="author" content="Alan Bradley" />
    <meta name="date" content="Fri, 15 Jan 1988 12:22:22 +1100" />
    <style type="text/css">

Sure, you can live without such niceties, but I'd prefer not to.

[0] I say "standard" because it's possible that pandoc's markdown
    extensions cover this particular example in a non-portable
    (i.e. specific to pandoc) way.

>> +1.  I believe I have adequate sed-fu to handle the majority of
>> differences.  There *will* be edge cases, and we can resolve these
>> by hand.
>
> Cool, so are you going to create the script?

I intend to do it on an ad-hoc basis once we dump the existing files
(and preferably, change history) into a darcs repo backed onto gitit.

We could ease this transition by making moinmoin still available during
this time, but only in a read-only fashion.