On 28 Feb 2008, at 23:04, Yuri Takhteyev wrote:
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.
Can we change the word "official" for the word "reference", which is
much more in line with what I actually meant.
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.
Indeed.
1) I'm not adding features to the Text::Markdown language.
2) I do however support a number of options (most of the things that
were hard coded globals in Markdown.pl can now be configured). These
*are all documented*, and have unit tests.
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?
The latter, given that it doesn't implement *any* of them :)
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?
Nope, I think that a 'formal' channel for discussing things like this
is needed. That'd probably be this list. The thing that we're missing
is a 'formal' / 'official' way to get a conclusion from these
discussions reached and documented.
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.
Totally agree. However, the fact that Markdown.pl *is* the reference
implementation (despite it's known bugs), is very sad.
I'd really like a spec (or set of specs, for different dialects) that
we could sanely write code against, however I strongly feel that the
reference implementation should stick like glue to the original
Markdown feature set, and only fix bugs and inconsistencies.
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.
Here here, I *strongly* agree with this. One of the main things I've
been trying to do is get a really good test suite together which can
be used as a yardstick, and I'll happily jump on the bandwagon and
contribute (and code to) any community effort for a better spec. :)
Cheers
Tom
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