forking Markdown.pl?

[Yuri Takhteyev]

>  I'd like to get to a point where I'm a little more happy with the

>  code, and then I'll start promoting this as a 'true' fork, or, if I

>  can get John to agree and approve - I'd like to become the 'official'

>  maintained version which is linked from daringfireball.


I am sure Markdown.pm will make life much simpler for those using
Markdown with Perl.  As a maintainer of a markdown module in a
different language, however, I am not as excited about the idea of a
new "official" implementation.  In fact, I think a new official
implementation is the last thing we need, since in the absence of a
clear spec, a new official implementation would be a source of great
confusion, especially if the new implementation suddenly adds a large
number of undocumented features.  Would this now make all of "Markdown
Extra" official?  (And give us two under-defined specs instead of
one.)  Or just those parts of Markdown Extra that Markdown.pm
implements?  And if Markdown.pm keeps evolving (which it should), does
this mean that we would now be on the hook for diffing Markdown.pm
code daily to find out what new features has become official?  Note
that I am not against the new features in Markdown Extra.  I added
some of them in markdown.py and I would add more or even all if we
could agree to make them official.  But I want to implement them
against a spec, not against a perl module.  I also think some of those
features should be discussed first.

Perhaps there is a need for a better _perl_ implementation (or a few,
competition is fun), but as far as "official" goes, we need a
comprehensive and up-to-date spec and a test suite against which all
implementations could be measured.

- yuri

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