[Docutils-develop] Round-tripping ReST files

[Kent T. <kt...@gm...>]

Howdy,

I am interested in the capability to read a rst file into
a doctree, write it back out, char-for-char.

This would allow editing tools which didn't create
spurious diffs due changes in section title adornment.

If the original title and adornment were stored in the
doctree it would make it easier to provide round-tripping.

I discussed this a bit with David at Pycon, he was
willing to consider patches.

I've attached 2 patches, the first, states.py.title_rawsource.patch
changes a few lines so that the lines comprising a section title
(underline, text, overline)
end up in the `rawsource` attribute of a title node.

The second patch, states.py.name_change.patch is cosmetic,
changing a name.

The string which ends up as `rawsource` is born on line 2852::

 source = '%s\n%s\n%s' % (overline, title, underline)

this patch changes it's creation and usage to `rawsource`

(This seems in keeping with the use of `source` in document.node
to identify if the input came from a file or a string.)

The tests run ok.

Thanks,
Kent