context team mailing list archive

["Yue Wang" <yuleopen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,

>
> Any suggestion welcome.



Well, just my 2 cents:


I think we can keep the current version for a while since it is pretty
stable and functional.
and I think we should keep that snapshot forever for historic reasons.
(some years later we will look back and see, "Wow, this is the very
initial MKIV".
and I think this will be a very good memory in the future.
[just like remembering the good old days of 4.4BSD-Lite while reading its code])


we can later ask the users to move to the next generation TeX once:
- we freeze MKII so we can remove all old files (especially binaries).
- we have a very stable LuaTeX (Taco said he will release that this autumn?)
- we have OpenType version of all Math fonts (Latin Modern, Iwona,
whatever). so all the map files/tfm files/ pfb files/vf files/ afm
files/.... can be removed to ensure a very tidy /texmf/fonts/ tree. we
can even remove the /texmf/fonts/ directory and just ask the users to
use fonts in OSFONTDIR.
- we have a stable version of bibtex in Lua (Hans said some months
earlier to me that he had a very initial version of lua based bibtex
parser) so we can have only one binary in our texmf-os/bin tree
- we have a nice GIT repository (as discussed this summer)
- the above will make writing an installer much easier.


btw, wouldn't it be great if we can ask our users to:
- download the LuaTeX binary according to their operating system
(compiled by contributors like Mojca, Arthur, Diego, me, etc.)
- download a file named context.fmt (generated by developers like
Hans) and download a Lua script called context.lua (this might be
optional, since we can make context a symbol link to LuaTeX or just
name LuaTeX context. Once context command is evoked, it automatically
load context.fmt)
- no more. they have a fully working TeX system now.
- (optional) if they like TeX related fonts, they can download a tar
ball containing all OpenType fonts and extract them to OSFONTDIR. This
also enable them to use these fonts in other programs (like M$ word).
- if they want to update their Minimals distribution, just grab the
LuaTeX binary and ConTeXt format file. we can put every releases of
the two files on web, so users can always select the version they
want. no need to write an extra installer (also no need for the users
to install svn/git/whatever)
- only the developers touch and commit the source code in the git repository.


Forgive me, I am just dreaming....


Yue Wang