The github pages gem provides a simple way to track the version of Jekyll being used by github and make sure that local versions of the site are always built with that version. Along with the best practice of not including incompatible configurations in _config.yml, this will make sure that the site always builds on github properly.
As mentioned in the commit, it seems that rdiscount, the now deprecated Markdown converter, was only being used for the smarty pants extension, which is now part of kramdown (the new default and only converter) by default.
The github pages gem provides a simple way to track the version of Jekyll being used by github and make sure that local versions of the site are always built with that version. Along with the best practice of not including incompatible configurations in _config.yml, this will make sure that the site always builds on github properly.
As mentioned in the commit, it seems that rdiscount, the now deprecated Markdown converter, was only being used for the smarty pants extension, which is now part of kramdown (the new default and only converter) by default.