[darcs-users] darcs wiki now using Markdown

[Eric Kow]

Hi all,

Just a heads-up for anybody who edits the wiki: We've switched from reStructuredText to Markdown (using Pandoc for our auto-conversion).

http://wiki.darcs.net

Hopefully any breakage this has caused will be easy to fix.

This switch is entirely motivated by network effects.  These days, Markdown usage is so widespread (off the top of my head, GitHub, Reddit, StackOverflow...), and enough people are familiar with it that it'd be a bit silly to ask people to have to learn two lightweight text formats just to make a little change to the wiki.

Thanks much to Trent, Mark and others who have pushed for our usage of reStructuredText.  If recall correctly,

1. When Trent was serving as doc manager, he advocated a separation of the user manual from the code (done now, thanks to Guillaume), and a switch from TeX to RST

2. When we switched from MoinMoin to Gitit, I decided to go with RST to avoid having two text formats within the community.

3. Now I'm going to assume that the arguments made 4 years ago in favour of RST (extensibility, convertibility with nice tools, good pdf/etc output) are now overwhelmed by the sheer popularity of Markdown and the fact that we're using Pandoc anyway.

Thanks.  And apologies if I've stepped on any toes in the process!  Erring more on the side of just doing things.

Eric

[1] http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2008-October/014883.html

-- 
Eric Kow <http://erickow.com>

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 203 bytes
Desc: Message signed with OpenPGP using GPGMail
URL: <http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/attachments/20120331/b163bb7d/attachment.asc>