The sad state of GFM specifications

[noirbizarre]

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Hello GitHubers !

I am sure I am not alone in this case, but GFM specifications are becoming harder and harder to follow, and I don't know anymore how to handle it.

Let me explain:

• The official specification site is not up-to-date (latest publication is than ~5 years old)
• The latest published tag is 1 year and half old
• The rendering behavior I observe on GitHub (issues, pull requests, READMEs...) doesn't match any of those 2 references, meaning GitHub is using another unpublished version
• There has been no answer to any of the raised issues for the last 3 years
• Specification which are based on CommonMark have not pulled upstream changes (GFM is still based on 0.29 while CommonMark has been updated to 0.31.2). However, it appears that the unpublished version in use already uses at least some of it.
• some behaviors, examples or new features/extensions (like alerts/callouts) are only documented in GitHub documentation and not backported in the specs
• there appears to be some differences between GFM on GitHub itself and GFM on other GitHub tools (like Gist)

Until now, I was using this file as a reference to test my implementation, but it doesn't seem to match exactly GFM real behavior on GitHub.

I am working on some tooling implementing GFM and I'd like to know how others are doing to have a proper GFM implementation in their tooling.
Is there another maintained source for those specs which I am not aware of, or are you accepting that it is now impossible to have a full GFM implementation?

Note that it took me some time to do this post because GitHub is a great platform, however I think it's sad (and quite ironic) that:

• a central feature like this could not have a decent implementation in GitHub ecosystem tooling
• the company who created GitHub Actions and GitHub pages is unable to automate such a basic publication
• random benevolent developers can do better at this job than such a big company

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