forking Markdown.pl?

[Joseph Lorenzo Hall]

good stuff... gruber's an asshole, as far as I can tell. best, Joe

On Sat, Mar 15, 2008 at 5:27 PM, Tomas Doran <bobtfish at bobtfish.net> wrote:

>

>  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)

>

>

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>




-- 
Joseph Lorenzo Hall
UC Berkeley School of Information
http://josephhall.org/