forking Markdown.pl?

[david parsons]

In article <9F6C6C2C-F48E-4BA2-BB5B-4F790CDE65B9 at bobtfish.net>,
Tomas Doran  <markdown-discuss at six.pairlist.net> wrote:

>

>On 27 Feb 2008, at 23:36, Joseph Lorenzo Hall wrote:

>

>> As many of you know, when a piece of open-source software languishes

>> with bugs for 3 years it's often forked  Markdown.pl is licensed under

>>  the BSD license. (do `>tail -35 /path/to/Markdown.pl`)

>>

>> Has anyone thought of forking and maintaining Markdown.pl (hopefully

>> with Gruber's blessing) to fix some of the known bugs?

>>

>> I'm not volunteering (I'd be horrible)... just seeing if it's time to

>> have that discussion.

>

>I'm actively maintaining the CPAN modules Text::Markdown, and  

>Text::MultiMarkdown, and longer term, I'd like these to become the  

>canonical distribution.


     Personally, I don't think that would be a very good idea.  Not
     because there's anything wrong with your implementation, but
     because the current Markdown.pl sticks fairly close to the syntax
     document while your modules extend it in a variety of ways.

     The fact that Markdown.pl is moving very slowly is a feature
     when it's the reference implementation.   It makes it much
     easier for new implementations to follow the spec when there's
     a stationary reference that can be used for auditing.


     -david parsons