[Zope3-dev] Status of reST

[Jeffrey P Shell]

I would like to, but time is the bastard.  There are some important 
issues that need clearing first anyways:

Docutils Dependency: do we keep a copy of docutils in our repository 
and update as needed?  There's still no real release process beyond 
nightly 'builds' for docutils (I think the last release is the very 
antiquated 0.2).  It's probably better *not* to put docutils in the 
source tree, but there are still some API change possibilities.  I 
doubt we'll do any *heavily* customized parsers or writers, so this 
isn't a huge issue.

reST sandbox works: There are a couple of useful tools in the reST 
"sandbox" contributed by various people using docutils.  There are a 
couple that may be of interest to us, particularly Bill Bumgarner's 
'DocArticle' writer, which generates HTML that doesn't depend on the 
docutils stylesheet.  The docutils stylesheet is great and yields 
beautiful standalone documents, but it can create problems when being 
used to generate HTML that needs to integrate with other HTML.  There 
is also a clever Wiki parser that finds potential wiki names during 
reST's processing/parsing time, which can sidestep potential 
double-processing (a situation that can occur in regular ZWiki).  There 
are some other useful works in the sandbox as well, along with some 
stuff I've already written to return the body of a document using 
reST's DOM-ish API's, allowing the content to be used in any content 
system.  My concerns here are:

   - A lot of useful work has already been done by other people
     that we could use.
   - It's all published under different open source licenses.
   - Maintaining our own copies could be time consuming, but
     too many dependencies are annoying for end users.

I'm not sure what to do about these two issues (which is all basically 
one big dependency issue).  I think reST has more than enough benefits 
to offer us, but there are still a couple of hurdles to deal with 
first. :\

On Wednesday, April 9, 2003, at 12:04  AM, Stephan Richter wrote:

> Hello,
>
> I was wondering, if someone is planning or would like to incorporate 
> reST into
> Zope 3? reST would be extremely useful for Zwiki and the Online Help.
>
> Regards,
> Stephan
> -- 
> Stephan Richter
> CBU Physics & Chemistry (B.S.) / Tufts Physics (Ph.D. student)
> Web2k - Web Software Design, Development and Training
>
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