Re: RFC: Description text in packages

[Alan Cox <alan redhat com>]

On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 04:20:07PM -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> So how does using untypable unicode bullets magically tell PackageKit
> that this is part of a list ? And which of the many bullet-like
> characters in Unicode do you want to bless for this ?

You have confused character encoding and semantic markup.

Unicode is character encoding

HTML tags or similar are semantic markup

Trying to extrapolate semantic markup from random ascii symbols is not
a reliable or robust path, particularly when you come to internationalise
things.

> If you ask me, something very simple like
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown is best for situations like this
> where you want to include light markup into text without letting the
> markup totally overwhelm the surrounding document.

Possibly, however package data in rpm headers is not wiki markdown and the
specification for RPM doesn't imply you can treat it that way.