March, 20, 2024 archives

Since the beginning (almost 24 years ago), my entries here have always been written in HTML with just a simple expansion of blank lines to create paragraphs.

A little over 20 years ago, a syntax for marking up plain text called Markdown was released and it has proven to be a fairly persistent and resilient success. And technically, my HTML with blank lines is compatible with Markdown.

That means that now I have plugged in a Markdown parser where my paragraph expansion was, and it just works and I can start using other syntax.

This is all heading down the path where I can plug in more text transformations, like server-side syntax highlighting for code.

<?php
echo "That would be nice.";
?>

(That won’t be highlighted yet, but whenever I do plug in syntax highlighting it should just happen.)

I’m using the Parsedown PHP library for turning Markdown into HTML, but it seems to be unmaintained and I may swap in something else.

It is possible that the Markdown parsing will mangle some old entries, but a quick scan of entries from this year looks okay, and I can easily fix stuff as I run across it. (I did already fix one very old entry that had some mangled HTML which just kinda worked before but got escaped with the new parser.)

I was doing a little more diving into Linux history, and ran across this thread from the alt.os.linux newsgroup from April 1992 where Paul Allen (not that one) suggested that distributions (which didn’t quite exist yet) should be source-based.

Binaries considered harmful

I may be missing something really obvious here, but I just don't see the need for all these binaries. I'd rather just have sources.

The most significant Linux distribution that ended up operating this way is Gentoo Linux, which is still going after almost 25 years.

This thread is also where Linus tells the story of how he lost the code to fsck to a bug in the VFS code.