Along with a number of improvements, David Parsons added a patch in v1.4.2 of his Discount that brings Qchar()’s signature in line with its prototype, and enables building the stock Discount source without modification under Plan 9’s APE.
% hget http://www.pell.portland.or.us/~orc/Code/markdown/discount-1.4.2.tar.gz
% tar xzf discount-1.4.2.tar.gz
% cd discount-1.4.2
% ape/psh
# ./configure.sh --help
... Available configuration options ...
# CC='cc -D_BSD_EXTENSION' ./configure.sh [ --enable-conf-opt ... ]
# make
# exit
% cp markdown [ makepage ] [ mkd2html ] $home/bin/$objtype
That’s easy enough, thanks to an emphasis on portability by Discount’s author, so we just use a mkfile to drive that underlying process & clean up some Plan 9-specific details on installation.
At any rate, the slimmed-down, pcc(1)-based markdown port has been synced with upstream, but is left as soon-to-be-deprecated. In place is a more functional and correct direct port of the latest Discount, ready to download: discount-1.4.2.p9.tgz (sha1:42f6eb238dea36be7c3d10a4eec0193758f14930). Change to the discount-1.4.2/Plan9 directory to find build support.
UPDATED - 20090615: Attempted to clarify my confusing description of the source change. Updated link to updated version of tarball.