forking Markdown.pl?

[Tomas Doran]

On 15 Mar 2008, at 02:55, John Gruber wrote:


> On Feb 28, 2008, at 12:34 PM, Tomas Doran wrote:

>

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

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

>> canonical distribution.

>

> I despise what you've done with Text::Markdown, which is to more or  

> less make it an alias for MultiMarkdown, almost every part of which  

> I disagree with in terms of syntax additions.

>


Wow, that's pretty strong language. I'm glad I'm provoking strong  
opinions, and it's nice to see you actively contributing to  
Markdown's direction ;)

Personally, I don't actually like (or use) the MultiMarkdown  
extensions. As noted several times on list (http://six.pairlist.net/ 
pipermail/markdown-discuss/2008-March/001100.html and others), I *do  
not* consider what I've done to in any way be a good solution  
technically / internally in it's current form, and as such  
Markdown.pl is still a better 'reference' implementation.

However I find it somewhat ironic that you can criticise an active  
effort to actually move Markdown forwards (who's current flaws have  
been publicly acknowledged), when it passes more of your test suite  
than your effort does, and when you haven't even been bothered to  
update your own website about the project since 2004, despite having  
updated the code which can be found on your site (if you dig) much  
more recently than this.

Don't get me wrong - the internals of the code I'm publishing are  
*shockingly nasty*, and I *am currently* refactoring so that  
Text::Markdown is a standalone implementation (with just the original  
Markdown feature set), that Text::MultiMarkdown builds upon. I will  
also shortly be providing a Markdown.pl that works for command line  
usage and also does the MT and bloxom plugin magic.

At that point my implementation will be less buggy (by your test  
suite), faster and more compatible with recent perl versions than any  
version of the 'original' Markdown.pl.  I also plan to (eventually)  
produce a Text::MarkdownExtra which adds those extensions, but I plan  
to do it from the same codebase, in some way that is less grotty than  
having a load (more) 'turn feature X off' switches.

The code I have at the moment, is, however a step along the road, and  
was the most pragmatic thing to do in the short term to un-fuck and  
update both modules.

I despise copy-pasted code, and forks for no (real) reason - seeing  
*another two* dead copies of the same code on CPAN made me sad, and  
so I've done *something* to take the situation forwards. Maybe if  
you'd put the effort into maintaining a community and taking  
Markdown.pl forwards at any time within the last 4 years, you  
wouldn't be in a situation where people have taken 'your baby' and  
perverted it to a point that you despise. If starting with  
Markdown.pl and going forwards with that *had been an option*, then  
that would have been my preferred route - but I didn't see any value  
in producing what would have been a **fifth** perl Markdown  
implementation.

Cheers
Tom

(http://svn.kulp.ch/cpan/text_multimarkdown/branches/ 
splitcode_unshell_Text-Markdown/lib/Text/Markdown.pm is where I am  
now, more stuff needs fixing / pulling apart to be able to do  
Text::MultiMarkdown without so much c&p code)