From the definition of long_description:
 
 *'long string'*
     Multiple lines of plain text in reStructuredText format (see http://docutils.sf.net/).
 
in:

  http://docs.python.org/dist/meta-data.html

I incorrectly concluded that the the bdist_wininst installer would provide visual markup for long_description specified in restructured text.

According to Thomas Heller, that is not the case.

I wish to suggest adding this clarification to the distutils documentation perhaps in one or both of the following documents:

 http://docs.python.org/dist/postinstallation-script.html
 http://docs.python.org/dist/meta-data.html

Thanks,

-- jv

I'm not quite sure what the problem is. What kind of "visual markup" did you expect?

I expected bold font when using "**" markers, list bullets when using "*" and "-" markers, etc. in the long_description text definition.  Unfortunately, all of these markers are simply passed through unprocessed in the long description text that appears in the opening window when running the generated binary installer.

Does this help clarify the issue?

Martin, you handle a lot of the Windows-related code, right? Thoughts on this?

Is there documentation somewhere that would explain what file to produce with what markup?

I added an item to the todo list of distutils2 so that the current behavior is documented: http://bitbucket.org/tarek/distutils2/wiki/Todo