bip 2: allow markdown

[achow101]

BIP authors should be allowed to write their BIPs in Markdown. The MediaWiki syntax that GitHub uses appears to be entirely undocumented (it does not always match mediawiki's documentation) which makes writing complex BIPs rather difficult. Markdown is much simpler and more concise.

[kallewoof]

I think this is an acceptable amendment. @luke-jr

[Roasbeef]

Omg, this would be amazing!

Mediawiki just feels so cumbersome compared to markdown.

[katesalazar]

Gonna guess this is missing changing buildtable around this line:

bips/scripts/buildtable.pl

Line 98 in e918b50

my $fn = sprintf "bip-%04d.mediawiki", $bipnum;

What's the workflow of the bitcoin.it webmaster once this is merged? Would you merge this if a compiler is needed and missing and no workaround is suggested? See: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Category:BIP

Concept ACK

[luke-jr]

BIP 1 supported markdown, but it was removed in BIP 2. I forget why - maybe simply lack of real-world usage?

Markdown does certainly seem more popular than mediawiki format these days.

Amending BIP 2 seems like an unclear proposition, however. First, someone needs to establish that there's some kind of consensus from participants, and secondly that amending Final BIPs isn't technically correct.

[katesalazar]

Hello, throwing a bunch of questions in the air

BIP 1 supported markdown, but it was removed in BIP 2. I forget why - maybe simply lack of real-world usage?

Note (from Wikipedia) "The initial description of Markdown[10] contained ambiguities and raised unanswered questions, causing implementations to both intentionally and accidentally diverge from the original version. This was addressed in 2014 when long-standing Markdown contributors released CommonMark, an unambiguous specification and test suite for Markdown.[11]".

Markdown does certainly seem more popular than mediawiki format these days.

Do you mean which flavor?

Amending BIP 2 seems like an unclear proposition, however. First, someone needs to establish that there's some kind of consensus from participants, and secondly that amending Final BIPs isn't technically correct.

Are BIP Comments abandoned? Any other point in discussion about BIP 2? Does it make sense to replace BIP 2 with new process?

[ajtowns]

Amending BIP 2 seems like an unclear proposition, however.

Why not just mark BIP 2 as "replaced/obsolete" and put the policy for this repo in PROCESS.mediawiki with that just being documentation for what this repo's maintainers' current policies are? Saying "we can't update the process to be efficient because the process requires us to be inefficient" is ridiculous.

amending Final BIPs isn't technically correct.

BIP 2 is marked as "Active", not "Final", for whatever that's worth. BIP 1 described that as "Some Informational and Process BIPs may also have a status of "Active" if they are never meant to be completed. E.g. BIP 1 (this BIP)."

[kallewoof]

@ajtowns points out that the BIP isn't final, so amending it with a minor change like the suggested one seems reasonable.

Unless there is active opposition towards this, I propose this is merged.

[darosior]

Concept ACK.

[katesalazar]

wut
does this mean, first BIP written in Markdown has to ship the necessary changes in buildtable.pl?
can we do the things in the correct order

[murchandamus]

Does #1577 address your concern, @katesalazar?

[katesalazar]

Yes, thank you @murchandamus !