Jana Hirsch wrote:
I first saw the discussion on this I thought "oh no, hopefully someone doesn't try to conform us into MD." There is a taller stack of deeper problems with the reasoning of the humans who do what you did, but I will restrain from writing an unpragmatic response, focusing on concrete details.
Genuine curiosity. What is the problem with adopting standards? I can’t see the downside of adopting Markdown over GOSH. Markdown is not proprietary, it’s an open standard. I understand the FOSS community can be resistant to standards, especially corporate backed ones, but they can be a necessity. Some individuals don’t like things just because they are popular and feel the need to be contrarian without substance behind that desire. There is also a forking culture in FOSS. The community will often fork a project if it becomes popular, but often it is in vain due to network effects, unless it is a significant improvement.
We would not be able to send emails, do mathematics, chemistry, or use the internet without common standards. We read English from left to right not because it is technically superior to right to left or bottom to top, but because we had to choose a standard method. There will always be competing standards, but eventually a single standard usually wins over the rest, even when it may not be the best at everything, at a certain point it just isn’t worth swimming against the tide unless you have good reason. Such valid reasons may be avoiding proprietary standards like Thunderbolt, DRM, Fire Wire or HDMI. Sometimes it may make sense if the dominant standard is significantly technically inferior to a competing standard.
We all agree the year is 2024, that’s the Gregorian calendar, but there are many other calendars that exist. Is it worth using alternatives if the Gregorian calendar is adequate?
At a certain point you must prioritise what really matters over others that don’t. Genode Framework and Sculpt OS are important, but GOSH isn’t IMO, we could easily use Markdown without losing what really matters(In case Norman reads this. This is not an attack on you or GOSH format, it’s simply that GOSH is not adopted outside of Genode and therefore isn’t supported on GitHub.). GitHub has explicitly said they do not intend to add support for additional markup formats. So we can’t expect GOSH to be adopted by GitHub.
For instance, Genode has adopted English as the standard for all communication in the project. In fact English is the dominant languages for nearly all programming languages, firmware, operating systems and open source projects. From a technical perspective, other languages could be better than English. But English is sufficient to not warrant change.
“Write your postings in English only. The use of any other language will generally be perceived as inconsiderate. ” https://genode.org/community/mailing-lists
If we had several languages on the GitHub Repository and mailing lists, it would cause such friction and inefficiencies that it would slow down progress significantly for no valid reason other than allowing people to use what they feel comfortable with, even at the detriment of collaboration ease and efficiency.
I am not a fan of Git at all. I don’t think it could be much more user unfriendly. I much prefer Darcs Version Control, but Git nonetheless is the standard, so I use it alongside Darcs.
The Gosh **format** is more universal than markdown, because one can read it on any device that displays txt-file. Lack of rendering does not prevent one from reading the files. Therefore your premise is certainly unsound.
I didn’t say that you can’t read GOSH without rendering it. It’s that reading the plain text version of any of these markup formats are distracting and mentally fatiguing compared to the rendered versions. I have spent time reading the Genode repository in plain text on GitHub. It is not enjoyable compared to reading natively rendered Markdown in other GitHub repositories. GitHub doesn’t support GOSH rendering, I desire a format that is natively rendered. Markdown fits that bill. There are alternate formats that GitHub supports too, if you have technical reasons for avoiding Markdown specifically.
The second one is a good idea: for new formats, the problem will always be how to convert this to Gosh (1 problem) instead of how to convert this to others (~ n problems). Also, it improves security, because we can know / can know that conversions should not be able to do anything more than what Gosh can.
I’ve never heard of any markup malware. I don’t even know if it’s possible. We would still audit the plain text before accepting it using any markup format including GOSH. GOSH doesn’t prevent this any more than Markdown would, you have to run the GOSH syntax through the GOSH Shell executable. You are still executing code based off the plain text file, GOSH or Markdown alike. If anything it’s worse with GOSH since the web browser that renders Markdown is at least sandboxed(Yes I know there are browser exploits that exist, but they aren’t that common and are patched quickly when discovered), but GOSH is running in the system terminal with full access to the home directory and possibly root directory depending on your permissions, It’s not sandboxed, at least on Linux. So if there somehow was malware in a GOSH file, it would do more damage than Markdown malware that is running in a web page browser I believe.
Thus, why not add (bi-directional) support for markdown to Gosh? I feel like you could then propose this again for the GitHub.
I can add that to this proposal as a secondary consideration, but that is not my goal.
My goal is to have Genode adopt a markup format(any format, it doesn’t need to be Markdown) that is supported on GitHub. I want the Genode project to grow, gain traction, contributors and attention. The best way to do that is improving the public front-end appearance of the project, which includes the GitHub repositories.
It may seem like a minor issue, but I think the front-end for a GitHub repository matters a lot for attracting attention of users just browsing and exploring GitHub repositories. I have stumbled across many interesting projects while exploring the GitHub topics. My first impressions are affected by how nice the GitHub repository looks. A professional and clean looking GitHub repository will always attract my attention and trust more than a GitHub repository that has had no effort and the readme files are just plain text. I know that aesthetics shouldn't matter since it should just be about the code quality and content, but nonetheless it does play a part for me when I come across projects. If it affects me, I am sure it affects others, and increasing our appeal by even a small margin is a win. It bugs me that the Genode GitHub repository looks ugly because it is just boring plain text which could be easily changed to look better with little effort. This is nothing against GOSH as a tool, it seems perfectly adequate for what it is trying to accomplish. It’s just not supported by any Git hosting sites.
Markdown allows extra features such as Logos, inline LaTeX, embedded hyper links, links to specific sections of the text etc. It also has a large ecosystem of tools and resources.