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

[Yoni Rabkin <yoni@rabkins.net>]

Tassilo Horn <tsdh@gnu.org> writes:

> 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).

I personally don't think that org is nice, or natural. Those are
subjective statements. Relying on the fact that lots of people use org
and formatted READMEs on github and such is not a justification either;
lots and lots of people use windows...

Making Emacs look like whatever happens to be popular shouldn't be done
at the expense of existing users. Org is popular, yes, but Emacs
shouldn't be a popularity contest.

The fact that there are people, like me, asking to be able to read a
text file as a text file should be respected. I would be fine with being
able to:

(setq packages-org-to-text t)

Or similar, and never have to to be confronted with ellipses and foreign
(to me) key-bindings when I'm trying to read a few lines of text.

Even better, if I had a simple:

(org-disable-org-mode t)

From then on I won't have to worry about being forced to read plain text
through a reincarnated implementation of "hypertext" from the 80s.

First do no harm.

-- 
   "Cut your own wood and it will warm you twice"