Recently, I "Markdownified" the online version of the NEWS file and
added some categories to avoid repetitive sayings like "... to be ML
compatible.... will be removed from Octave 7...." which is boring to read:
https://www.gnu.org/software/octave/NEWS-5.1.html
Now I am able to read the changes on my smartphone without horizontal
scrolling as well ;-)
Are there any objections against using Markdown for the NEWS file in
general? Octave already uses Markdown for the README file and the
current style of the NEWS file is quite close to Markdown anyways. This
makes it easier to create a good looking news announcements without to
much post-processing on the website.
By using a plain text editor the file is still readable [1] (even better
if the editor supports Markdown-syntax highlighting). The only drawback
as with README is, that we cannot help the editor by adding a prefix
like "NEWS.md". This would violate the GNU Standard in automake [2].
If there are no objections, I would merge my NEWS-5.1.md
<http://NEWS-5.1.md> changes with the stable branch (omitting some
website related additions) and Markdownify the current default branch.
Best,
Kai
[1] https://hg.octave.org/web-octave/file/0bcf9964773c/NEWS-5.1.md
[2] https://www.gnu.org/software/automake/manual/automake.html#Strictness