format will change from LaTeX -> (CommonMark|AsciiDoc): which should we chose?

[Bradley M. Kuhn]

Yoni, your email from August got caught in the approval queue and just made
it to the list a few days ago.   Sorry about that!!!

Yoni Rabkin wrote on 16 August:
> I don't think that it's reasonable to require people to contribute in
> any particular format _at this stage_. This isn't a programming project
> and doesn't need to compile.

Yeah, in fact it says just that in the contributing guide.  The problem is,
notwithstanding that, people have told me: "Oh, I don't know LaTeX so I
can't contribute".

If we switch formats though, the same thing could easily happen.

> Patches should not be turned away merely because they are in the wrong
> format, as long as it is a free one.

Yeah, we haven't even turned around non-patches of just "text to add" or
suggestions of "this part is missing explanation on topic Foo".  Such as
Mark Radcliffe's complaints about the warranty disclaimer sections.  In that
case, we took feedback that had to be communicated to us via a third party,
because Mark didn't bother to give his feedback directly to us, but
complained to others about it in another context.  So, we got wind of what
he'd said, and did some research and updated the section.

So, we've even taken backchannel criticisms to make things better.  We will
definitely take any type of feedback that comes, and even if it's just "this
section seems wrong to me" which is roughly the example with Radcliffe's
feedback.

> I think that the persons doing the majority of the work to integrate the
> patches and then to produce the various output formats should determine
> how this is done technically.

For the moment, that'll still be me, but now that we've added a few more
commit bits, perhaps the committers should just decide as a group on this
question?  Maybe make the decision for a one-year time frame and reconsider
it a year later?
-- 
   -- bkuhn
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