launchpad-users team mailing list archive

[Pierre Equoy <pierre.equoy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 11:20 AM, William Grant <william.grant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> wrote:

> On 28/01/15 13:45, Pierre Equoy wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Jan 28, 2015 at 10:38 AM, William Grant
> > <william.grant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:william.grant@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>>
> wrote:
> >
> >     On 28/01/15 13:01, Pierre Equoy wrote:
> >     > Hello everyone,
> >     >
> >     > I wanted to add a feature request about adding Markdown to the
> different
> >     > Launchpad text fields (description, comments), but I realized
> there was
> >     > already an open bug about this [1].
> >     >
> >     > It looks like Martin Pool did all the work in a separate branch
> back in
> >     > 2011, and therefore this feature is (almost) ready for the users,
> but...
> >     > no progress since then, and in 2012 the bug was unassigned and its
> >     > priority reduced to "Low".
> >     >
> >     > Could someone pick up this branch and review it? I think it would
> be a
> >     > valuable addition to Launchpad, especially for links and code
> blocks.
> >     >
> >     > Thanks in advance!
> >
> >     As detailed in the bug you linked, Martin's branch was merged in
> 2011,
> >     but nobody has picked up where he left off. Markdown support is not
> >     currently a priority for Canonical's Launchpad team, but we'd happily
> >     help with and accept a patch that got the feature closer to
> >     production-ready.
> >
> >
> >
> > Thanks for your quick answer!
> >
> > I indeed didn't see his proposal had been merged to the lp:launchpad
> branch.
> >
> > So what work is remaining to have this feature ready exactly?
>
>
>  - Some kind of caching is required, as Markdown rendering performance
>    is insufficient for widespread realtime use.
>
>  - Links must be rendered with rel="nofollow" to dissuade spammers.
>
>  - URLs and other text must be linkified (see
>    <https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~launchpad-pqm/launchpad/devel
>    /view/head:/lib/lp/app/browser/stringformatter.py#L499> for the
>    existing implementation).
>
>  - Elements rendered from Markdown need to be styled appropriately.
>

Are there already rules about the styling? Existing CSS or something like
that...


>
>  - Non-editable content (eg. comments) needs previews to avoid
>    formatting mistakes.
>

Sidenote question: what is the rationale in not being able to edit comments?


>
>  - Thought needs to be given to not corrupt the rendering of existing
>    plaintext comments, and to minimise misinterpretation of email
>    content as Markdown.
>

Do you have a sample "e-mail content" that could be a problem?
I suppose when people use e-mail to answer a comment in Launchpad, it is
stripped out of any formatting and used in plaintext mode... but maybe I'm
wrong.

Thanks for the feedback!



-- 
Pierre Equoy
QA Engineer | Canonical
www.canonical.com | www.ubuntu.com