Deciding the future of commonmark.py · Issue #308 · readthedocs/commonmark.py (original) (raw)
Hi everyone, from Read the Docs we would like to open up the question about the future of commonmark.py. The landscape of Markdown in Python and Sphinx has changed a lot over the past 12 months, and in particular markdown-it-py by @chrisjsewell et al achieves a level of extensibility that is beyond what's possible with commonmark.py (see #106 (comment)). Similarly, MyST-Parser provides a broader feature set than what recommonmark offers.
As a result of the latter, and with the hope of optimizing efforts, a couple of months ago we decided to deprecate recommonmark in favor of MyST-Parser. Since commonmark.py has a similar status, we would also like to deprecate it - but given that the project has a richer history and it's also a lower level package, we would like to first ask the current maintainers their opinion.
@nikolas and @lu-zero are the ones that have been merging code to commonmark.py in recent years. There are a bunch of open bugs and pull requests that haven't received much attention, and the last release is from October 2019 (ah, the good old times without global pandemics). Nobody from Read the Docs plans to step in and address them, so we would like to offer two possibilities:
- We find a new GitHub organization for the project, where the same or new maintainers can give it some love, or
- We add a similar deprecation note than the one we placed on recommonmark README, and archive the repository here.
If there is no response or consensus in a reasonable time frame, the latter option wins, since anyone can fork the repository anyway. But we would like to give others the chance to speak up so the complete repository, with all the issues and pull request history, can be cleanly transferred.
Thoughts?