repo: add README

README.md

@@ -1,2 +1,36 @@
 # wiki-link
-Stupid as can be system for linking wiki content to an in-game friendly format/location.
+
+Stupid as can be system for linking wiki content to an in-game friendly
+format/location.
+
+## Description
+
+Dune runs a [DokuWiki] instance. DokuWiki has its own unique [markup language].
+We want to be "render" the markup language into a format suitable for display
+in-game. It turns out we can do that pretty easily for Markdown, but DokuWiki
+doesn't use markdown...
+
+Enter this repo. We install a simple Python script as a `systemd` service. It
+watches the wiki content directory for `.txt` file changes. These occur whenever
+a wiki page is edited/saved. This service invokes [pandoc] to convert the files
+that changed from DokuWiki syntax to GitHub compatible markdown syntax. The
+output markdown files are rendered to a location in-lib so that LPC code can
+read them.
+
+One last wrinkle: production Dune runs on a stable LTS operating system that
+doesn't have a new enough version of `pandoc` in package repository to support
+DokuWiki syntax. That's easy enough to solve: we vendor a pre-built `x86_64`
+Linux binary in-repo and use that :P
+
+Tada! Wiki content available in-game, nicely rendered, with very little code.
+
+[DokuWiki]: https://www.dokuwiki.org/
+[markup language]: https://www.dokuwiki.org/wiki:syntax
+[pandoc]: https://pandoc.org/
+
+## Development
+
+* Install Python (we target 3.9 to match our crusty prod LTS OS).
+* `python3 -m venv .venv`
+* `source .venv/bin/activate`
+* `pip install -r requirements.txt`