New release (1.8 / 2.0 ?)

[dregad]

Dear maintainers,

Today marks the 5th anniversary 🎂 of Parsedown 1.7.4), which is the library's latest official release.

I was really happy to see some activity again this year, and would like to thank you all for your efforts !

Unfortunately the current state of the project is somewhat confusing at the moment... The 1.8.x branch has been merged into master (#881) in October, and the subsequent commit 999fcf788675b65b5344e2744443fc4d5f76cc14 bumped the version to 1.8.0, but there has not been any corresponding tag or release yet.

Mid-November, there's been some discussion about what the next version number should be (1.8.0 or 2.0.0), as well as concerns about the state of the code in the master branch (https://github.com/erusev/parsedown/pull/881#issuecomment-2472689241), but as far as I know that has stalled.

PHP 8.4 has been out for over a month now, and as you're probably aware there are deprecation warnings in the 1.7.x branch, which have been fixed in master (6ae01284b835bddc0264a2ac4e63f570b9457357) but can't be used with a regular composer update due to the lack of an official release.

It would be truly awesome if, to celebrate 2025, we could start off with a fresh new release... Please 🙏

Thanks in advance and happy new year to everyone ! 🍾 🎉

[bohwaz]

It seems that work on the 2.0 branch has stopped?

[ArnaudLigny]

I propose a compromise: we abandon version 1.8 (because of the aborted betas) without going towards a major version (2.x) and... we jump to version 1.9.0 :-)

[dregad]

Anything other than status quo would be good 😉

[DigitalSorceress]

Came here because I had forked from 1.8.0-beta-7 at one point, and made a small setter change (to let me specify if it should set target attributes to _self or _blank

I admit I didn't do the best job with inline comments so I ended up diffing to see what I had changes - only to find that I don't even see the 1.8.0-beta-7 anywhere and I was confused when I too saw that the 1.7.4 had .. included some stuff from the 1.8 betas

So yes, just wanted to say it would be nice to get that sorted.

For my part I think I'm going to go back to 1.7.4 latest and reapply my changes to that rather than risk having built off abandoned betas.

I've genuinely found parsedown to be a great little tool for letting me make web sites semi-static (the parsedown part is dynamic but all my content is in .md files ... making it low friction to write and publish new stuff.

UPDATE:

So my confusion just got worse...

I decided to

git clone https://github.com/erusev/parsedown.git

and then diff with my minor modifications I noticed that even though the parsedown github latest is 1.7.4, weirdly this gave me a parsedown.php that was

    const version = '1.8.0';

Granted, it was pretty darn close to what I had originally, but there are significant differences from when i grab the 1.7.4 packaged version - that one still shows

    const version = '1.7.4';

so, I'm going to go with that 1.8.0 tagged one and go from there I guess

[adnweedon]

@erusev Thanks for all your work on this project! I just wondered whether you might be able to provide an update on a new stable release, or whether this project is no longer maintained - as a number of others have found, we're looking at upgrading to PHP8.4, so an official release to patch the deprecations would be fab!!

[DigitalSorceress]

...t wondered whether you might be able to provide an update on a new stable release, or whether this project is no longer maintained - as a number of others have found, we're looking at upgrading to PHP8.4, so an official release to patch the deprecations would be fab!!

If you grab the current code (not the 1.7.4 release), but clone the master branch of the repo. It's been updated to handle the deprecation of implicit nulls which I think was like the most clear "PHP >8.x does not like that"

I'm not part of the project / team but I had looked into this and that was my finding - the version labeled 1.8.0 in the current master branch seems to be OK for recent PHP (I'm running 8.3 with it without issues)

Hope that helps.

[Stoakes]

The lack of maintainer activity on such an impacting thread is appalling. Especially as erusev hasn't disappeared from Github : he has daily commit activity on private repos.

Isn't it time for a community fork ?

[erusev]

Sorry, it's been a difficult couple of months for me, I'll try to look into this later this month.

[DigitalSorceress]

Sorry, it's been a difficult couple of months for me, I'll try to look into this later this month.

Sorry things have been rough - I feel you...

And, thank you so much for all the work you do / have done.

The good news is that 1.8.0 seems mostly compatible without PHP screaming

Indeed PHP is currently at 8.4 and has dropped support for anything pre 8.1 (and that ends in December)

From what I've run into, mostly the big bugaboo is about newer PHP deprecating implicit nulls, and so it's pretty much just adding null Coalescing - which .. I thought the 1.8.0 branch did so maybe it's just sanity checking 1.8.0 and tagging it for release to replace 1.7.4?

[dregad]

@DigitalSorceress there is a reason why @aidantwoods did not release the code currently in the master branch as version 1.8.0, please refer to discussion in PR #881 particularly my post https://github.com/erusev/parsedown/pull/881#issuecomment-2472689241 for details.

Hence my proposal to commit a minimal change providing PHP 8.4 compatibility (PR #900) and release that as 1.7.5, to get this blocking point out of the way. Then we can focus what should happen next, i.e. this PR.

In my humble opinion, to respect semantic versioning, code in master should be released as 2.0.0, while 1.8.0 and the corresponding betas are marked as withdrawn.

Then the 2.0.x branch should probably be renamed 3.x and maybe someone can pick up the work where @aidantwoods left it.

[DigitalSorceress]

@dregad

In my humble opinion, to respect semantic versioning, code in master should be released as 2.0.0, while 1.8.0 and the corresponding betas are marked as withdrawn.

Then the 2.0.x branch should probably be renamed 3.x and maybe someone can pick up the work where @aidantwoods left it.

Thanks, That makes sense.. +1 fwiw

[adnweedon]

@erusev Is there anything we can do to help you prep the new release? 🙂

[adnweedon]

@erusev I'm really sorry to keep bothering you (particularly if things are difficult for you!), but as the only maintainer, you're presumably the only person who can make things happen - any chance we could get a release for 8.4 compatibility? It looks like BenjaminHoegh has put a PR up with the fixes, if that's the way you want it to go.