forking Markdown.pl?

[Aristotle Pagaltzis]

* Tomas Doran <bobtfish at bobtfish.net> [2008-03-18 13:15]:

> My preferred solution would be for the 'original' (i.e.

> daringfireball brand) Markdown to have most of the code in a

> module called Text::Markdown, but to supply a script wrapper

> called Markdown.pl which provides the original functionality.

> This is what I've done in Text::Markdown currently so that

> people get the best of both worlds.


Note that this doesn’t mean giving up ease of installation that
people currently get. (Ie. non-Perl people, which is basically
every end-user, for whom it is admittedly a burden to install a
CPAN distribution, can just drop a file in some directory and
maybe +x it and that’s it.)

The model here would be Andy Lester’s _ack_ utility (an awesome
grep replacement for trees of source code): it’s available from
CPAN as the App::Ack distribution written in the regular way, as
a module using several other modules and invoked from a small
script. Anyone familiar with Perl who knows how to install
modules can install this just like any other CPAN distro.

But the distro’s build script also has a target that rounds up
all the necessary modules and pastes them into the script file,
producing a program that needs just perl itself preinstalled on
a machine; this is available as `ack-standalone` from Andy’s
site for ack. That way, people who don’t know about modules and
CPAN and all that can just copy a single file onto their machine
and be off to the races.

That seems like a perfectly suitable model to handle Markdown.pl.

Regards,
-- 
Aristotle Pagaltzis // <http://plasmasturm.org/>