[steveklabnik]

This is covered in the post, no?

> There is a fundamental difference between these two kinds of content: the user comments are stored in our databases, which means their Markdown syntax can be normalized (e.g. by adding or removing whitespace, fixing the indentation, or inserting missing Markdown specifiers until they render properly). The Markdown documents stored in Git repositories, however, cannot be touched at all, as their contents are hashed as part of Git’s storage model.

[tbrock]

Sure, but I'm still confused as to why the display format setting has anything to do with the on-disk format. To me they seem completely orthogonal.

[kivikakk]

In general people have come to expect that hitting return once in a comment field on GitHub will produce a newline, having been the case for many years, so we try to preserve that expectation. Hence not changing the option being used when rendering comments.

Conversely, they don't expect the same from Markdown files stored in their repository (e.g. I put each sentence in a paragraph on its own line for my blog, for easier diffing and editing). Additionally, we couldn't normalise these documents even if we wanted (to prevent everything breaking by being over-vertically spaced). Hence not changing the option being not used in this case!

[steveklabnik]

Because using the new display format with a non-normalized source would break the display.