Add support for #+begin_abstract in the GitLab's org-mode renderer

Problem to solve

Emacs' org-mode has a semantic markup feature aimed at making export into formats that support abstracts (such as pdf) easier.

It consists of blocks that look like:

#+begin_abstract
This bug report proposes to implement begin_abstract in the GitLab org-mode renderer.
#+end_abstract

At the moment GitLab removes such blocks.

I use org-mode as the main substrate for my documents, as being able to export files into many formats is very handy. I add an abstract to most of my org files, because it is a very natural thing to have a short summary at the top of every file. The files I write I keep in a GitLab repo, which makes them immediately available to the broad audience. As GitLab removes the abstracts from the documents, the files end up published incomplete. I do not see a strong reason to do so.

Intended users

People who write documentation in the form of org files and add short summaries on what these files do.

User experience goal

For example, this file https://gitlab.com/Lockywolf/linuxbugs-lwf/-/blob/master/doc/2020-07-21_How-to-Read-Books.txt.org

would be better exportable into various formats if I could use "begin_abstract" in it.

Proposal

The suggestion is to just ignore the two lines #+begin_abstract and #+end_abstract altogether. No need to do any specific rendering for the abstracts. Just keeping the text and not removing it would be good enough. It may be not the most faithful representation, but it keeps the content intact.

Further details

No further details. There may be other uses for the abstract field, but those are beyond the scope of this report.

Permissions and Security

This issue does not affect security nor permissions.

Documentation

Availability & Testing

I don't know. Unless stripping #-lines requires a lot of difficult parsing, this should be easy to implement.

What does success look like, and how can we measure that?

Abstracts not being removed from org-documents.

What is the type of buyer?

Programmers who use org would be more likely to recommend buying a commercial subscription for GitLab to their managers.

Is this a cross-stage feature?

I do not understand this question.

Links / references

https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/127715/how-to-place-abstract-before-first-section-in-org-modes-latex-export https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tutorials/org-latex-export.html https://orgmode.org/manual/Special-blocks-in-LaTeX-export.html#Special-blocks-in-LaTeX-export