Re: ConTeXt versioning model critique

[Ulf Martin <ulfmartin@web.de>]

Vyatcheslav Yatskovsky schrieb:
[...]
> My experience of using open-source products (I'm best familiar with
> Moodle) suggest that there should be overlapping cycles in
> development: 1. Allocate new version number and start implementing
> new features.  Many things are broken at the moment and the version
> becomes unusable for production purposes. 2. Stabilize this version
> and make definite release (number x.x.). Now it can be used for
> production. 3. Continue resolve bugs in this version AND perform Step
> 1 IN PARALLEL.
[...]
> I think ConTeXt needs similar versioning model badly. Now it has
> rather naive model (release dates) that doesn't help in deciding
> about stability at all.
> 
There is another reason for adopting a versioning model: legacy documents.

I wonder how people (esp. at Pragma) currently deal with this. What
happens if you have a ConTeXt doc from say 1997 that compiles into the
resp. PDF with some ConTeXt version from that time but not today
anymore? Which ConTeXt versions does one have to keep in order to be
able to use such a document? (A good example for this kind of trouble
seem to be the current issues with XeTeX, but I haven't followed this in
detail -- but it kept me away from updating my ConTeXt installation
since December...).

Also remember that Knuth originally intended TeX to be an "eternal"
formatting system (thus we have at least the option to expand all macros
into plain TeX and keep that as the source file).

This raises another question: is ConTeXt developed in an test driven
way? I.e. are there test documents (including e.g. XML documents,
bibligraphic references etc.) that have to pass comilation in order for
changes to be published? If so, they would probably define a standard
set of commands that could go into The ConTeXt Companion.

Cheers
Ulf