Re: upto current

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

On 3/19/2013 7:47 PM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Mar 2013, Hans Hagen wrote:
>
>> One these days there will be a first iteration of this years 'current'
>> release. This has to do with the texlive code freeze.
>
> Are there any plans to do an actual development freeze a few weeks
> before the TL code freeze to ensure that the TL version is not beta
> quality.

The code freeze is in about a month. In principle Mojca/Taco can use the 
current beta as starting point for testing. I have no clue if there are 
issues but as context is rather independent there shouldn't be many

I have just one (flat) source tree here so freezing current also means 
freezing beta. Afaik Mojca never figured out how to have a current 
alongside a beta in her git setup, otherwise someone could push fixes 
from beta into the current branch. I have no time to look into that kind 
of stuff.

> Although most active users use ConTeXt standalone and are willing to
> update frequently, TL still plays an important role in introducing new
> users to ConTeXt. An experienced TeX user who wants to try ConTeXt is
> more likely to try ConTeXt distributed as part of TL rather than ConTeXt
> standalone. When there are serious bugs with ConTeXt TL, it gives the
> impression that ConTeXt is not a mature macro package.

Sure. Although mkiv, certainly at that time, was a bit more beta, even 
the then 'current' -)

> As anecdotal evidence, I used ConTeXt TL for my most recent article for
> tugboat. There were some serious bugs in ConTeXt TL (multi-column
> footnotes not working, marking styles not working, wrong font scaling,
> etc.) and I had to struggle to get everything to work correctly. Most of
> these bugs were fixed in the latest beta. But if I were a new user, I
> would not have the patience to download and test the latest beta when a
> supposedly stable release has serious bugs.

Last year we froze too soon. In retrospect we should have pushed the 
beta (also because we froze about the time the new luatex came out). In 
retrospect frozen could have been less frozen then. We even had the 
weird situation that the generic font code was frozen in current but the 
last versions were taken for non context use instead of the frozen code. 
But that's out of our control anyway.

> So, I'd like to suggest that for a few weeks before the TL freeze, we do
> a ConTeXt-beta freeze with only changes being bug fixes.

We can try .. I have no plans for drastic changes (and no time for it 
the next weeks anyway). We depend on users to notice things that are 
broken (let's forget about things that could be improved): fonts  not 
rendering, files not being found, crashes due to typos, etc.

Hans

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