context team mailing list archive

[Arthur Reutenauer <arthur.reutenauer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> Any objections or other comments?

  Not from me, I find that's a really good process.

>  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.

  I think you've outlined both the problem and its solution in this
sentence: it would help to build all the binaries frequently, *but* it's
hard to get quick responses from all the binary builders, *hence* it's
more efficient to work at a slower pace, i.e. by releasing about once in
a year.  Plus, it gets work off your hand and shifts the burden to Karl
and Peter :-)

>        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.

  Right.  There's a kind of balance to it, I think: XeTeX development
was most active in 2004--2006, then LuaTeX took over and the focus
shifted, etc.  It's unlikely that two different extensions of the TeX
engine would be actively developed at the same time over a long period.

	Arthur