Richard Stallman [2025-12-03 23:25 -0500] wrote: > I have to wonder -- would it be adequate to identify NEWS and README > files in markdown format in some other way, not depending on > indication with a file nsme extension?
It could be adequate for tooling that we control, but I doubt it would be adequate in the general case. The motivation for treating NEWS.md as another name for NEWS is that: - These are the two names recognised by Automake since v1.16.4. - A lot of existing tooling already consistently knows how to render and display text files based on their file name extension, be that .html, .org, .md, or otherwise. This is particularly convenient when browsing source code online, as many if not most forges render files this way. > For instance, they could be identified by some sort of -*- line, > or perhaps deteced with a special-case hack that would look > at the file contents and conclude "this is in markdown format". > > This would avoid difficulties with having NEWS foes whose names > are not simply NEWS. Even if we successfully lobbied for such a change in all relevant software out there (which I am not volunteering for), that would be trading one small difficulty (a clarification and perhaps example in GNU documentation) with an arguably much larger one (convincing other software projects to heed our magic file marker). If a GNU maintainer currently wants to maintain a file named NEWS whose contents follow Markdown syntax, they are already able to, even without a -*- line. My argument, however, is that accepting NEWS.md (and perhaps README.md) as aliases of their sans-extension version would allow them to fit in with an existing and consistent convention in the broader ecosystem (including Automake and Gnulib). Thanks, -- Basil
