develooper Front page | perl.perl5.porters | Postings from March 2023

Markdown in emailed bug reports

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Zefram via perl5-porters
Date:
March 20, 2023 18:17
Subject:
Markdown in emailed bug reports
Message ID:
ZBijIw+mMhf9PsCI@fysh.org
Dan Book wrote:
>FYI whatever mechanism you are using to send this email is rendering it
>unusable for me. I receive only an attachment with no file extension that
>Gmail cannot preview.

Thanks, that's useful information.  That'll be related to what we
discussed a few weeks ago on the "perlbug UX" thread about bug reports
being written in Markdown.  I've written recent bug reports in Markdown,
three of them so far, and aside from being perfectly serious bug reports,
they've also been test cases for the toolchain of handling bug reports in
this format.  I was expecting to have a conversation about this two weeks
ago, as a result of the "non-grapheme delimiters not properly prohibited"
bug report, but that one seems to have been ignored.

I've been imitating what would happen if perlbug had asked for the
user-edited part of the bug report to be written in Markdown, and had
added MIME headers saying that the report is Markdown.  The relevant
header that I've been adding is:

Content-Type: text/markdown; variant=GFM; charset=US-ASCII

Presumably Gmail doesn't know how to handle that media type.

On my end, I'm comfortable with the authoring process.  I write each bug
report initially in plain text, then apply a small program that I wrote
that converts plain text into the basic kinds of markup in Markdown.
I'm not totally confident about the correctness of the markup that
it generates, because it's based purely on GitHub's documentation,
without testing.  (I have no ability that I'm aware of to put test
content through GitHub's renderer.)  But "refaliasing breaks refcounting
of field variable" got put into GitHub in a form that looks correct,
so that's encouraging.

Further comments welcome about the handling of this form of bug report
from reception of the email onwards.

-zefram

Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About