launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Jonathan Lange <jml@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Sep 17, 2009 at 3:39 AM, Tom Berger <tom.berger@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 2009/9/16 Barry Warsaw <barry@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> On Sep 16, 2009, at 12:33 PM, Karl Fogel wrote:
>>
>>> I think your comfort with reST syntax is interfering with your ability
>>> to see the inherent editor-unfriendliness of having a two syntaxes in
>>> the same wiki :-).
>>
>> I can see that a wiki gardener's job will be harder if s/he has to learn two
>> syntaxes, but it should be plainly obvious when looking at the raw text of a
>> page which format is being used.  The first line of all rest pages will be
>>
>> #FORMAT rst
>>
>> Now here's another interesting question that this leads to.  If/when we ever
>> get something like wikis in Launchpad, what format(s) are we going to
>> support?  I hope to Guido we won't perpetuate the madness which is moin. ;)
>
> Moin, and I'm not sure it's so mad. Moin is more popular (among wiki
> users) than ReST and in many cases it is closer to the syntax of other
> wikis than ReST. There are some things I like better about its syntax
> too. Headers are much nicer to read and write in moin, for example.

If it's a choice between Moin & reST, then Moin for sure. But there
are plenty of other wiki formats out there. FWIW, I've argued before
that we ought to use MediaWiki syntax, since it's by far the most
widely-used wiki markup in the world.[1]

More interesting questions than "which format(s) will we support?" are:
  - "what constraints are there on formats we can support?"
  - "on what criteria do we assess a format?" etc

cheers,
jml

[1] Citation needed.