Update to Jekyll 4.x (kramdown) or move away?

[aureliojargas]

I use redcarpet as the Markdown processor in my website:

aurelio.net/_config.yml

Lines 16 to 19 in 2e4396d

	markdown: redcarpet
	redcarpet:
	extensions: ["fenced_code_blocks", "autolink"]
	# extensions: ["no_intra_emphasis", "fenced_code_blocks", "autolink", "strikethrough", "superscript"]

Unfortunatelly, it is not supported anymore in Jekyll 4.x, so I would have to migrate to kramdown instead.

But kramdown has some drawbacks:

• URL autolinks are not supported and I use that extensively (it works fine in GitHub and in redcarpet). Having to expicitly add <> around every URL will be a pain.

• My image plugin stopped working. Maybe it's just a matter of adjusting regexes (see the ending /> in the new code).

  -<p class="image"><img src="img/moneylog.jpg" alt=""></p>
  +<p><img src="img/moneylog.jpg" alt="" /></p>
  
  -<p class="figure"><img src="/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/ringtones-itunes.png" alt="Toques já adicionados ao iTunes"><span>Toques já adicionados ao iTunes</span></p>
  +<p><img src="/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/ringtones-itunes.png" alt="Toques já adicionados ao iTunes" /></p>

• It's good that some entities are converted to real chars ("pronto" → “pronto”). But note that those are not plain quotes, but fancy quotes (" vs “).

• It's good that automatic ids are made, but they are not sanitized as ASCII-only: <h2 id="compre-as-peças">Compre as peças</h2>

Note that I will also have to upgrade my local Ruby version, since macOS ship with an ancient one. brew install ruby solves it.

None of those is a deal breaker. It's just annoying to have this extra work because Jekyll keeps changing it's defaults and supported tools. It makes me wish for a different, stable tool. Also, the ruby/bundle setup always gets me puzzled. A python tool would be more familiar.

Also note that a year passed since 4.0.0 release (Aug 2019), but GitHub Pages still uses 3.x. Update in Oct 2022: three years have passed and it's still 3.x.

See also:

• redcarpet must be pinned to 3.3.4: 8cb5d7b

References:

• Very detailed post about Jekyll 3.x → 4.x migration
• Jekyll Changelog
• Kramdown config

[aureliojargas]

See branch https://github.com/aureliojargas/aurelio.net/tree/jekyll-4.1.1