Re: Upgrading ConTeXt and testing

[Taco Hoekwater <taco@elvenkind.com>]

Hi Idris (and all),

Idris Samawi Hamid wrote:

> When a new ConTeXt is released, Taco or someone else could then document which 
> bugs are fixed, features added, and, most importantly, what features are 
> changed or broken. 

Whenever someone reports a problem, the release notes on the wiki
enable me to quickly look up changes in the code (to check for
possible regression errors). It has saved me a lot of time in the
last half year or so.

But the release notes is not enough, we are aware of that. Three
other projects in the pipeline are:

* A read-only CVS containing as many of the old ConTeXt releases as
   we can find, for reference and regression checks.
   This cannot be started immediately because we first have to collect
   all of the old zips, so they can be imported in the correct order.
   (assigned to Patrick and me)

* A limited-access CVS with Hans' current working sources, so that
   some of the active developers can apply patches themselves
   (assigned to Hans)

* A test suite, precisely as you proposed (not assigned to anybody
   yet <wink>)
   The best way to boot this project is to request/create a project
   on Fabrice Popineau's gforge/subversion server:
     https://foundry.supelec.fr/

   (we intend to use the same gforge server for the read-only CVS)

> A related point (disussed before) is that ConTeXt needs to become completely 
> independent of the TeX distributions. mswincontext.zip is a good start (I no 
> longer use fpTeX), but things like dvipdfmx and the plain format (for testing 
> purposes) need to be thoroughly supported and tested. 

Yeah, I very much agree. Here is the run-down on last night's
problem:

Hans does not ship lang-us.pat, probably because someone told him
not to (that sort of stuff is a whole different story). What
happens then is that context's file synonym mechanism tries to
find a replacement file for lang-us.pat.

I do not have ushyphmax.tex installed, so on my system, that means
ushyph.tex, and it works fine. But apparently (sometimes? dependant
on install options perhaps?) miktex ships a ushyphmax.tex. And a
broken one, at that. It took most of yesterday-evening to discover
that. :-(

> Again, a support team 
> for Hans is needed (especially for Mac OSX and Unix), and I'm willing to help 
> as far as my skills will allow.

Lately, we get a lot of bug reports for miktex, which is problematic
since none of us use miktex: I believe Hans has a fptex-ish system,
and most other 'core' people are either linux or macintosh based.

A volunteer for miktex would be brilliant (even better: someone who
knows how to compile miktex executables).


Greetings, Taco