Re: [bug-womb] Texinfo markup in package blurbs

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hey Brandon,

Brandon Invergo <address@hidden> skribis:

>> Guix has gained the possibility to have Texinfo markup in package
>> descriptions¹, which is properly rendered by user interfaces and at
>> <https://www.gnu.org/software/guix/packages/>.  Often we just limit
>> ourselves to ornaments such as @dfn, @code, or @uref.
>> 
>> Perhaps we could consider using it in pkgblurbs.txt if the needed for
>> enriched text arises?
>
> pkgblurbs.txt is also used in GSRC and for generating
> https://gnu.org/manual/blurbs.html and the "featured package" blurb on
> the gnu.org front page.  So with Make, we would have to strip the markup
> while for the web we would have to convert it to HTML.  I guess we could
> do an intermediate solution, like some m4 macros, to output the desired
> format for each target, but that might be a bit over-engineered.  Ideas?

ISTR that Karl had implemented a script that converts sequences like:

  `[^ ]+'

to:

  <code>\1</code>

for the HTML output.

You could do something like that for address@hidden  However, that
wouldn’t scale well to other tags.

So I would suggest using Guile as well, along the lines of:

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/guix/ui.scm#n816

and with ‘recutils->alist’ to extract the text from pkgblurbs.txt:

  http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/guix.git/tree/guix/records.scm#n328

Now, I would understand if you think this is going too far in the Guile
direction, however pleasing that may be.  ;-)

> A more pertinent question: are there any blurbs in particular that you
> think should have some text marked up?

No, no particular example in mind, rather forward-looking.  I guess
those that use the `foo' sequences could be changed to @code{foo} to
begin with.

Cheers,
Ludo’.