We have several markdown inline patterns in pagure/pfmarkdown.py. These inherit from the upstream markdown.inlinepatterns.Pattern class, which used to be the only game in town (well, it and its more specific subclasses). As of last month, though, they've invented an alternative called InlineProcessor. This is a rather more sane implementation that avoids a lot of weird things Pattern does (like the way it pads out the regex in self.compiled_re, for e.g.). It should also perform rather better as it handles matching and substitutions such that the regex isn't required to match the entire string (which is why the padding is no longer done).

We might want to look at shifting our inline patterns over to this new base class, at least once a sufficiently new markdown is available as a dependency in all environments we care about.