[Metacello] Limitation: Class comment styling is ignored

Hi all,

I first wrote an issue on Squot before I realized this is a general feature request concerning Metacello: When you perform any styling operations on a class comment (for example, by using <cmd>6 in System Browser), Metacello does not track these changes (but even reverts them if another change to the comment is loaded). This can be kind of disappointing. I would love an update to make Metacello styling-sensitive at this point.

I am not familiar with the Metacello architecture at all, but as a user of the SquitBrowser, I would find it quite useful if the README.md - which stores the class comment - contained the html representation of the comment text. html serialization is almost bijective for Squeak Texts and GitHub's markdown flavor displays html texts quite well. There are a few TextStyle classes which do not yet implement the html protocol properly, but I think the remaining implementation would be uncomplicated. If I am not mistaken, serialization/deserialization would be to put in Class>>#asClassDefinition and MCClassDefinition>>#load.

If I am informed correctly, Cypress/filetree is reponsible for generating the readme files? Is this mailing list the right place for proposing such a change? Are there other packages (like Monticello) which require a plain-text class comment and would need an extra #asString fallback transformation? However, this are just some thoughts, so I would greatly welcome your reactions :)

Best,

Christoph