On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 11:22 AM, Philip Holzenspies <pkfh@st-andrews.ac.uk> wrote:
On 22 Aug 2012, at 16:13, Brandon Allbery wrote:
On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 4:37 AM, Philip Holzenspies <pkfh@st-andrews.ac.uk> wrote:
So, there are many things people read in the proposal that I didn't want to put in, but the things I very much do want to include get lost in translation also. I wanted to allow the GHC source itself to be written in markdown.

If the existing source tree is using one form of markup, changes and additions should really be consistent with what's already there instead of introducing a new kind of markup.  This could actually be *more* disruptive.
The point was that quite a bit of the GHC source has markdown-like things in it, using LaTeX-style code-fencing, but LaTeX-incompatible markup (like underlining section with ~~~~~).

Even so.  A concrete version of what I'm getting at is that ghc is self-bootstrapping, so older versions need to be able to build newer ones; GHC code using a new markdown literate preprocessor --- or, worse, one integrated with lexing or parsing --- will not be buildable with GHC versions predating its addition.  So even given the addition of such, ghc wont itself be able to use it for at least several releases, to give OS distributions etc. time to upgrade their packages to versions that can build the result.  (Asking them to re-bootstrap is usually asking too much; they'll likely just stop updating or possibly drop ghc entirely.)

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