Thanks for your extensive comments Aditya. It's (finally) *much* clearer now.
> Now you have two options: Either isolate minimal context from the one
> provided by the distribution, or make them co-exist. Isolating them is
> easy, the minimals even come with a script "setuptex" which does that. So,
> you just source setuptex before running context. If you want minimals and
> distribution tex to coexits, things are a bit tricky. You need to
> understand how the tex distribution works, which is an intangled (for the
> want of a better word) mess.
I'll take the isolation option then.
A question about the minimals...
http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Minimals mentions "The Minimals are an attempt to provide the same functionality as the current Pragma's minimal ConTeXt distributions in the zip files."
What's the difference (in provided functionalities) between the contextgarden minimals and the pragma ones ?
Alan
On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 11:05 PM, Aditya Mahajan <adityam@umich.edu> wrote:
> Yes. If you do not need latex, the safest thing to not install anything
> tex related from your distribution and only install the minimals from the
> garden. (You need to update using the mechanism provided by the minimals,
> and not ctxtools).
>
> The trouble with this is two-fold. First, you may need to use latex, and
> second, many packages on linux require tex, so you get a tex from the
> distribution also.
>
> Now you have two options: Either isolate minimal context from the one
> provided by the distribution, or make them co-exist. Isolating them is
> easy, the minimals even come with a script "setuptex" which does that. So,
> you just source setuptex before running context. If you want minimals and
> distribution tex to coexits, things are a bit tricky. You need to
> understand how the tex distribution works, which is an intangled (for the
> want of a better word) mess.
>
> However, the more fundamental question is: why do you need to update tex
> manually, why doesn't the distribution update tex frequently. Part of the
> reason is that it did not need to. Before luatex and xetex, tex binaries
> got updated occasionally. So, a periodic update of the binaries was good
> enough. As for macro packages, the biggest component is LaTeX, and LaTeX
> core is updated *very* slowly. So, again a periodic update was good
> enough.
>
> ConTeXt somehow spoils the party by adding features at an alarmingly fast
> rate. So, if you want to use new features you must update. So, someone
> needs to package everything for the distribution so that all users can
> frequently update context.
>
> Currently the only distribution that does that is Debian. Norbert Preining
> maintains a .deb for context macros which is updated fairly regularly. So,
> if you are on a debian based system, you can use Norbert's context
> package, and have a fairly recent context (~1-2 months old) distribution.
> For most cases this would work, unless you want to test the latest
> features.
>
>
>> Side-question: "But if you happen to update TL package" - what does TL
>> stand for ?
>
> Texlive. Currently TUG (Tex User group) releases a DVD each year
> containing the recent copy of all tex/latex/context packages and all
> binaries needed to run tex and friends on Windows, linux and mac. These
> days, most linux distributions use texlive as a source of tex packages
> that they include.
>
> Aditya
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