kramdown 2.0 and beyond

[Thomas Leitner]

Hello everyone,

you will also find this information at
https://gettalong.org/blog/2018/kramdown-2-0-and-beyond.html

The kramdown project has become an umbrella project for many parsers,
converters, math engines, ... It is time to split things apart to make
them more manageable and have faster release cycles.

Once kramdown was really a **pure-Ruby** Markdown-superset conversion
library. Nowadays, it includes many extensions that rely on Ruby gems
with C extensions or even on other programming languages like NodeJS.
This makes updating and testing kramdown more time intensive since one
has to install and manage all dependencies -- and as we all know,
NodeJS *loves* dependencies...

Therefore starting with release 2.0 the core kramdown gem will be
reduced to a meaningful subset of extensions, and all other extension
will get their own gem. This will allow more independent development
and faster releases.

I will still develop the core kramdown gem and I will help out with the
extensions if I have time but as of now I'm looking for
developers/maintainers for the following extensions (contact me at
t_le...@gmx.at if you are interested):

* GFM parser
* PDF converter
* mathjaxnode math engine
* sskatex math engine
* katex math engine
* itex2mml math engine
* ritex math engine
* coderay syntax highlighter

The plan is to release the next kramdown version with the current
pending changes. Then kramdown 2.0 and all extension gems (in their 1.0
version) will be released, with no code changes. From this point
onwards each gem has its own release cycle.

Thanks and all the best,
Thomas