I wrote a simple readme to one of my Python package Fadapa. I built the package using setuptools. In setup.py file, for long_description field I just read README.md file and assigned it. After uploading the package to PyPi, I saw the page and found that PyPi doesn't support Markdown format. So I had to change it to reStructuredText.

Pandoc is the best tool available to convert markup formats. It supports a lot of formats and you can convert it to any format you want.

If you have a few documents to convert, you can convert them online. You can also install in in your system if you want to convert a lot files. Instructions on how to install on various operating systems is give here.

For ubuntu you can install by

sudo apt-get install pandoc

Then you can convert files using

pandoc readme.md --from markdown --to rst -s -o readme.rst

This converts readme.md to readme.rst.

Pypandoc is a simple python wrapper for pandoc. Using that also, you can convert files.

Install it using pip

pip install pypandoc

and then to convert files just do

import pypandoc
output = pypandoc.convert('somefile.md', 'rst')

Update: There is an feature request with pull request to add support for Markdown for PyPi.