Maruku 0.7.0.beta1 released
I’ve just pushed Maruku 0.7.0.beta1 to RubyGems.org. This is the first real release of Maruku in over 4 years. I released version 0.6.1 exactly one year ago, but that included only a single fix on top of the 0.6.0 code (for Ruby 1.9+ compatibility).
Last year, I said in “I own Maruku now”:
My present plan is to work towards releasing Maruku 0.7.0 (with a beta beforehand) as a bugfix release including the Nokogiri changes. I’ll fix whatever bugs I can without drastically changing the code, document in tests everything I can’t fix easily, and make sure there aren’t any more regressions from the previous release. I’d actually rather minimize or remove the usage of Nokogiri in the library, simply so that Maruku can have fewer dependencies, but that may not be an attainable goal. Maruku 0.7.0 will also drop support for Rubies older than 1.8.7.
It took far longer than I thought, but that goal has finally been completed, including the removal of Nokogiri as a hard dependency. There have been 447 commits by 15 contributors - I made about half of those, followed by Jacques Distler and Natalie Weizenbaum in roughly equal measure. Ignoring whitespace changes, 405 files were changed, with 8,745 insertions, and 21,439 deletions. I always consider it a good sign when more code is deleted than added. Maruku now has pretty good test coverage and tests are green in Travis CI for Ruby 2.0.0, 1.9.3, 1.9.2, 1.8.7, JRuby, and Rubinius. You can see all the changes in the CHANGELOG.
Maruku 0.7.0 should be viewed as a fixed version of Maruku 0.6.0. While its behavior has changed because of bugfixes, the interface is the same, and there have been no major removals or additions with the exception of support for fenced code blocks (familiar from GitHub Flavored Markdown) which can now be enabled via the :fenced_code_blocks option.
At this point, what I need is for Rubyists that use Maruku to try out the new version and file issues for any bugs they find. If everything’s OK for a few weeks, I’ll release 0.7.0 final, at which point I can start working on Maruku 1.0.0, which will hopefully be a more major change.
I’ve got some more things to say about the future of Maruku, but I’ll hold off on that until 0.7.0 is completely out the door. In the meantime, please give it a try!