[Docutils-develop] reST (DOM) -> reST (text) Writer?

[Dethe E. <de...@ma...>]

Hi all, 

Has anyone seen or written a writer which produces reST from the
document tree?  I've had to pause in the include/raw/directive work
while I convert some legacy documents into reST for maintenance.  Some
are arbitrary HTML and at least one is DocBook.  It occurs to me that
the simplest thing for handling XML formats would be to convert them
into reST's XML format (canonicalization?) and then into reST for
editing.  Round tripping is a problem, especially for attributes and
styles, but in some ways that's a Good Thing[tm] since it will enforce a
certain style to the resulting documents.

I realize that directives, in particular, will not round trip well,
since they are not represented in the document tree.  Are there any
other Gotchas that folks can think of offhand?

Does anyone else think there's value in round-tripping documents?  Would
it be worth adding a marker to the document tree (either an element or
an attribute) to the effect that 'this is generated content from
directive xyz with options foo, bar="ni", baz="blue, no, green"'.

Does anyone have an alternative solution?

--Dethe