Greetings all. Before I do too much work on a fork of Spinach, I wanted to see if anyone else was doing likewise so as there is not too much duplication of effort.
My goal is mainly to have a version of Spinach that does not remove certain choices from people. I understand why Spinach limits the choices it makes available based on how the developers see things like tables and placeholders as anti-patterns. I happen to disagree but I respect the opinion. My concern is that I have seen those elements (particularly tables) work too well in too many organizations, particularly those with banking, clinical trials, ad serving, and insurance. Those are the environments I tend to work in and that I think a very structured tool like Spinach could do well in.
I also understand the concern about regular expressions. That said, I think placeholder concepts, like that used by the tool Turnip, can certainly mitigate that, particularly in environments that are heavily algorithmic like I mentioned above. Whole classes of clinical trials or banking scenarios can (and I would argue) should be matched with steps that are parameterized.
So my goal is, at minimum, to create a Spinach version with the same structural attributes that it has over Cucumber, but with the addition of supporting tables and (at the very least) placeholders.
What I want to do is see if anyone has started on a similar path such that it either makes sense to join efforts or, at the very least, compare notes.