Hi all, I am using Omd for my personal website. I am really happy with it but I have some things I would like to add. Recently I worked on adding Footnote support. However it seems like there was no activity in the last year. Currently I am using my fork but would be happier if these changes end up in the original library so others can also benefit from it.
Hello! Thank you for sharing your work on Omd and posing this question
afaik, omd is in need of new maintainers. There was a call for new maintainers several years ago, which I heeded to the best of my abilities at the time. Since then, my availability for helping maintain it has been eliminated by life’s demands, and my interest due to the publication of cmarkit (which I find preferable in every respect I care about).
Is there anyone with availability or interest in picking up maintenance of omd?
I don’t know if I will have enough time, but if nobody else is interested I can try to be a maintainer. It’s an interesting project for me and I believe I would enjoy working on it.
With that being said, I wasn’t aware of cmarkit, it seems like it has everything I need already. And I wonder what would be the benefit of having two libraries that essentially does the same thing? I believe if there is one library that works well, spending time for a second one could be better spend in other areas. What do you think?
This is a relevant question. In my opinion, unless there is a clear reason to have competing implementations of the same functionality, it is not worth splitting efforts like this. In the specific case of OMD, it is a project that has been dormant for a long time and whose API is considerably less powerful than cmarkit
(which eg already supports footnotes). Perhaps OMD should be kept working for existing users, but new users should be directed to cmarkit
instead.
On a “branding” level, I think it may be a good idea to move OMD out of the Github ocaml
organization since, as far as I know, it has no direct link to any of the OCaml “core” projects nowadays. It could be moved to ocaml-community
for instance (cc @avsm).
Incidentally, OMD used to be used to generate ocaml.org but they switched to cmarkit
some time ago: Replace Dependency on omd with cmarkit by oyenuga17 · Pull Request #1642 · ocaml/ocaml.org · GitHub.
Cheers,
Nicolas
Indeed, omd served its purpose admirably for a decade, but has no direct dependencies now on any core projects due to the switch to @dbuenzli’s excellent Cmarkit.
In the absence of any objections in the next few weeks, I’ll move it out of the ocaml/
org to ocaml-community/
with the same current maintainer team having access.
That all sounds good to me!
This is now done; GitHub - ocaml-community/omd: extensible Markdown library and tool in "pure OCaml" – do let me know if there are any teething problems with the move, but a repo redirect should be in place.