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Re: changes in building scripts

 

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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