I was saying that to Jana, who seemed to be implying that Gosh was doing something fundamentally different, which I don't think is the case.
Not making any further comment on if its worth it to the dev team or not, not sure we can know what their priorities are on this anyways.
Spencer wrote:
> I feel like this misses the point somewhat-
> Markdown is also aiming for the 'readable as a text file' and really is a very similar technology to Gosh. Also, whether they are .gosh files, or text files that happen to implement gosh doesn't matter much, just as .md doesn't matter really (unless the viewer has special case rendering for one or the other)
I am not missing the point, I completely understand what GOSH is and how it works. GOSH is a markup format like Markdown. My point is simply to adopt a markup format, any format, that is supported by GitHub so users can read the documentation and GOSH files in a properly rendered markup format, not plain text GOSH. I would say that less than 100 people have ever installed or used GOSH on their systems. On their other hand, at least 10’s of millions of people have used Markdown, and Billions of people have read Markdown rendered pages on the internet. If you have ever visited GitHub or any Git hosting site, it is almost assured you have encountered Markdown rendered text.
Whenever a new user comes across an open source project, they do not immediately clone the project and then comb through the source code to see if they are interested in contributing. They will browse the GitHub repository on the GitHub website instead, and gauge if they are interested in it. This means they will be relying on GitHub to render the text formats on the website for them. However GitHub doesn’t support GOSH so if they want to read the properly rendered GOSH text they must install GOSH on their system. Having to require a user to install an unknown tool such as GOSH just to be able to read the documentation GOSH files without reading the ugly plain text is a major barrier to entry. Because you are requiring the user that installs this executable on their system which means they either need to blindly trust that it is safe, even though it only has 10 stars on GitHub which means it hasn’t been audited by many users, or you need to comb through the source code and audit it to verify it is not malicious, just so you don’t have to read plain text any more. But if we had just used Markdown instead, a user would never need to encounter this extra source of friction and tooling just to be able to contribute easily to Genode. They would be able to easily browse the source code and documentation in a supported text rendering format on the GitHub website without having to install and trust an executable by the Genode project to read the GOSH text.
GOSH is an unknown format to any user outside of the Genode project. Therefore, just because Genode developers are comfortable with GOSH doesn't mean outside users are. At least with Markdown it is a widely used and widely known format and there are many ways of rendering it.
There is only one way to render GOSH files and you must either trust or manually audit the GOSH source code if you want to render the GOSH text files.
This is why I think we should use a markup format, such as Markdown, which is natively rendered by GitHub so it makes for a much improved user experience when browsing the Genode GitHub repositories without having to install GOSH. Most users aren't going to go through the steps of Cloning Genode, GOSH, TCL/TK and auditing the GOSH code before they are comfortable installing it on their system.
> Imo its really, is it worth the hassle to switch from something already known and liked (gosh) to the very similar competing format (markdown) to gain compatibility with the surrounding ecosystem.
Yes it’s absolutely worth it in my opinion. It’s close to zero hassle, we have automation software to do this in minutes as I have linked in my original text. Also, GOSH is not able to be live previewed in real-time, Markdown can be. In VSCode I can write Markdown and preview in real-time easily. I can’t with GOSH and this creates additional hassle and friction for me to use GOSH. So if we ever wanted to write and preview GOSH documents at the same time, we would have to implement some embedded browser rendering script allow for this the same way we can do with Markdown. This would vastly increase the scope and developer’s time for GOSH which would just be reinventing the wheel that Markdown has invented for us. I understand that GOSH is over 19 years old, so Markdown was only just being created then. But it is clear which format has won in popularity, tools, features and adoption, it’s not GOSH.
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