What's the point of the markdown filter?

[jvoisin]

Miniflux supports converting feeds from markdown to html via github.com/yuin/goldmark, but I fail to see a usecase, as I don't know a single rss/atom feed that spits markdown and not html.

If it has no use, it' be nice to remove it, as reducing the amount of external dependencies is almost always a win, packaging-wise, security-wise, reliability-wise… but also size-wise, as it adds adds a lot of code to the miniflux binary:

$ goweight | grep goldmark
  2.5 MB github.com/yuin/goldmark/ast
  2.4 MB github.com/yuin/goldmark/util
  1.7 MB github.com/yuin/goldmark/parser
  448 kB github.com/yuin/goldmark/renderer/html
  364 kB github.com/yuin/goldmark/text
  139 kB github.com/yuin/goldmark
  114 kB github.com/yuin/goldmark/renderer
$

• I have read this document: https://miniflux.app/opinionated.html#feature-request

[fguillot]

It was introduced in this PR #1513

This PR adds a new rewrite rule that parses markdown. Parsing is done with a new dependency yuin/goldmark. This PR also configures the parse markdown rule by default for blog.laravel.com.

Removing this feature would be a breaking change for the few people that use it. I'm not aware of any lightweight alternative Markdown parser library in Go.

[jvoisin]

I don't think it'll break anything, as nobody should be using it. The reason it was added, blog.laravel.com, doesn't publish markdown.

[gabe565]

@jvoisin Funny timing, I actually just opened a PR to remove that rewrite rule (#2958). When I originally added this filter, Laravel's feed was in markdown, but they've since fixed it. It looks like there's another rewrite rule for https://www.recalbox.com/rss.xml which still returns markdown. It isn't very common (and honestly probably a feed generation bug), but it seems to happen occasionally. That being said, I agree that a smaller binary would be nice...

Edit: In actuality, it adds ~2MiB to the binary size

-rwxr-xr-x@  1 gabe565  gabe565    20M Nov 22 01:11 miniflux-with-markdown
-rwxr-xr-x@  1 gabe565  gabe565    18M Nov 22 01:12 miniflux-without-markdown

[jvoisin]

I don't think that any other feed reader does support markdown. It does indeed looks like a feed generation bug to me.

[gabe565]

True! Although in my experience, most feed readers don't support rewrite rules in general.

I just tested recalbox with "Fetch original content" and without parse_markdown. Posts loaded fine, so it isn't necessarily required for that one.

[jvoisin]

@fguillot what do you think? If I sent a pull-request to remove markdown support, will it get considered/merged?