forking Markdown.pl?

[Tomas Doran]

On 29 Feb 2008, at 05:17, Michel Fortin wrote:

>

>> ...  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?

>

> That's how I've been keeping in sync with Markdown.pl while it was  

> updated (diffing each release). This is practical only when the  

> code is kept pretty similar, as in PHP Markdown vs. Markdown.pl.


I don't see that our community & spec being broken is a good reason  
for the reference implementation to not fix bugs.. However I do  
appreciate the pragmatism of what you're saying - I myself have done  
quite a lot of diffing in-between markdowns ;)


> Hum, while it's difficult to spec Markdown because its author  

> doesn't seem so much interested, I think creating a spec for  

> Markdown Extra is possible. I could host it on my website,  

> alongside PHP Markdown Extra, and I could change PHP Markdown Extra  

> to fit that spec. It'll take some time to write though, and I'm not  

> sure in what form the grammar should be expressed, but I suppose it  

> could be done.


I think that it *should* be done. If a community effort to write a  
spec / standardise emerges then I'm more than happy to join / make my  
code comply.


> I'm maintaining MDTest for that. If anyone wants a new test case to  

> be added to MDTest, I'll gladly accept it. If anyone wants to  

> dispute one of MDTest's expected result, I'm open to discussion,  

> preferably on this list so that everybody can take part.

>

> Although it's lacking its proper web page, MDTest and its download  

> location have been previously announced on this list. Here are a  

> few interesting links about MDTest:

>

>  -  Latest release announcement:

>     <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/markdown-discuss/2007- 

> September/000815.html>

>  -  Download link for latest release:

>     <http://michelf.com/docs/projets/mdtest-1.1.zip>

>  -  GIT repository:

>     <http://git.michelf.com/mdtest>


I've stolen this into Text::Markdown and Text::MultiMarkdown, but I  
think that some chunks of it fail (even though a lot works).

I'll find some time to look back into it, and post to the list with  
my conclusions, as I've probably got a whole chunk of test cases that  
I want to add, and I'm all for a community maintained test suite of  
Markdown (and it's various dialects) :)

Cheers
Tom