Hard Line Breaks in RedCloth

RedCloth has historically observed hard breaks (i.e. a carriage return creates a <br> tag), following other Textile parsers' example.

RedCloth 3.0.4: hard-breaks-challenged

In the release 3.x series, RedCloth tried to merge Textile and Markdown syntax. The result was nauseating. This series defaulted to no hard line breaks, though it provided the option to enable :hard_breaks. But that was broken in 3.0.4--it output line breaks even where paragraphs were warranted.

The broken part was fixed but never released. All the while Ruby on Rails kept the :hard_breaks option on and recommended people install the older RedCloth 3.0.3.

RedCloth 4.0: hard breaks redeemed

Version 4, a total rewrite, corrected many of the failings of its predecessor, including hard breaks. The :hard_breaks option is ignored and hard breaks are used regardless.