Re: Convert README.org to plain text README while installing package

[Tassilo Horn]

Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com> writes:

>>>> I think we should actively encourage using it for most types of
>>>> documentation, certainly for README type files.
>>>
>>> I disagree entirely with you.  Org mode is highly complicated,
>>> obscure (I've never managed to get a feel for what it does), and
>>> difficult to learn (I've never managed it).  A text file is far
>>> easier to read for those not familiar with org.  We're talking about
>>> READMEs here.  They're typically 20 to 100 lines long.  A text file
>>> is ideal for these.
>>
>> 1+. README is a text file which is consulted in order to get
>> information about the related software. There's no rule to visit it
>> by Emacs only.

People nowadays write README.org and README.md files instead of
plain-text READMEs because the packages' repositories are hosted on some
forge (sr.ht, github, gitlab, gitea, whatever) which supports rendering
those formats in a nice way.  So the choice of format is natural for
package authors.  And they frequently contain markup like headings,
bullet lists, bold, italics, and code snippets which simply look much
better than their text-only alternative (even in their
editing/non-rendered versions).

> Hear, hear!
>
> It also takes a relatively long time to load Org mode, so opening a
> README.org-type file for the first time will always cause an annoying
> pause.

That's true but wouldn't it be possible to extract the font-lock/faces
related parts in a separate file with no dependencies which can be
loaded quickly enough?  I mean, the purpose would only be to display org
and markdown READMEs with the highlighting intended by the package
author but there's no point in enabling the gazillon of other features
(from editing to time-tracking to spreadsheet computations) those
packages might provide in addition.

Bye,
Tassilo