context team mailing list archive

[Hans Hagen <pragma@xxxxxx>]

On 23-9-2010 7:52, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I do not plan changes until three weeks from now, but I have just realized that:
> - pdfTeX hardly keeps changing at all

indeed, we can just stick to the regular tex live binaries and update 
once per year

> - XeTeX hardly keeps changing at all (there have been some recent
> changes in microtypography though)

idem

> - there are constant problems with building pdfTeX and XeTeX on
> different platforms
> - ConTeXt is leaving pdfTeX and XeTeX behind

and even then, there are no changes needed as no new functionality shows up

> - 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)

indeed, although it's best to stick to versions that have proved to work ok

> - metapost is being built together with luatex
> - TeX Live 2010 has just been released, so binaries from TeX Live
> should do their job

indeed

> 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)

makes sense; maybe only update pdftex/xetex when there is a reason

> 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.)

you're right, we need to assess this regularly and indeed there is no 
real reason for pdftex/xetex etc; both moving targets luatex and mp are 
covered in parallel so that's ok (ok, we still depend on akira's updates 
but we can only take the few bins we need)

I expect the same to happen with fonts ... eventually lm/gyre/... will 
be stable

Hans

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                                          Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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