Re: [netmod] [Tools-discuss] reflow of YANG descriptions, and general YANG format annoyances

I ensured that I have the latest version of the Emacs YANG mode, and find
that M-q works well to wrap description strings, but...

   1. Should I expect intelligent behaviour of RET and TAB when within a
   description (or other) string? I find that (in this context) RET positions
   the cursor at the start of the line, and TAB does nothing. Ideally RET
   might position the cursor at the indentation point of the previous line, or
   one character past the opening quote if this was the first line.
   2. Wrapping (quite reasonably) can't handle cases where the author
   didn't in fact intend line breaks to be inserted. The most common cases are
   probably (a) not using a blank line as a paragraph break, (b) text was
   further indented (which often implies literal text), or (c) text started
   with * (or -, ...) and was to be interpreted as a list item.

I don't believe that RFCs 7950 and 8407 say anything about paragraph
formatting, but most NETMOD YANG does seem to adhere to the convention that
paragraphs should be separated by blank lines. Perhaps this could be made
into a stronger convention?

As for the other cases (further indentation -> literal, and */- mean list
items), of course this is getting back to the markdown discussion. I
believe that when this has come up before the discussion has died for want
of clear standards. However I do believe that it would be very useful to
define some layout conventions (or rules) that allow automated reflow and
other formatting, and personally I would take it further than just the
three points that I have mentioned! It doesn't have to be called
'markdown'...

William

On Sat, 7 Nov 2020 at 05:07, Carsten Bormann <cabo@tzi.org> wrote:

> On 2020-11-07, at 01:06, Michael Richardson <mcr+ietf@sandelman.ca> wrote:
> >
> > M-q reflowed a paragraph, but made it too long with 76 columns wide.
>
> Is your .emacs setting fill-column to a non-standard value?
>
> C-x f 69 RET
>
> or put
>
> // -*- fill-column: 69 -*-
>
> into the first line of your YANG file (in a comment)
> or better
>
> (add-hook 'yang-mode-hook
>           '(lambda () (set-fill-column 69)))
>
> in your .emacs.
>
> Grüße, Carsten
>
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