I'm okay with including a html readme in the installer, but it has to be fully self-contained with no separate images or style sheets, and can't have any dependencies on reaching the network (until the user clicks a link, obviously).

My concern with just including the rst file as-is is the formatting, particularly of links, which are now much harder to read and copy than in the txt format.

In any case, we can't build a release until this is resolved one way or another. Perhaps RMs are happy to maintain the plain text version? Or we should let the github home page version diverge entirely from the actual readme and add back the original file. (I am only concerned about releasing it, so I'd like the people who maintain it to weigh in.)