context team mailing list archive

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I do not plan changes until three weeks from now, but I have just realized that:
- pdfTeX hardly keeps changing at all
- XeTeX hardly keeps changing at all (there have been some recent
changes in microtypography though)
- there are constant problems with building pdfTeX and XeTeX on
different platforms
- ConTeXt is leaving pdfTeX and XeTeX behind
- both developers of pdfTeX and XeTeX seem to be pretty busy, so bug
reports in building process for both of them rarely get fixed
- building LuaTeX trunk hardly makes any sense unless it's done on
daily basis which nobody does or is willing to do (apart for testing
the building process and reporting problems before the official beta
is released)
- metapost is being built together with luatex
- TeX Live 2010 has just been released, so binaries from TeX Live
should do their job

As a consequence, I plan to change the whole building process into a
single step:
- just build the latest luatex beta
- take luatex and metapost from that build
- take everything else from TeX Live
- (maybe try to build luatex trunk, but don't commit it into repository)

Any objections or other comments?

(I feel that frequent building of pdfTeX and XeTeX could help find the
problems in building much faster than during the lenghty TL
production, but if developers are not too responsive, that hardly
helps. When we started the minimals, all kinds of new functionality
has been added to XeTeX that was crucial for proper functionality of
ConTeXt in XeTeX, but I don't know of any other recent addition with
that kind of influence.)

Mojca