ConTeXt on Debian: The wiki entry

["Frank Küster" <frank@kuesterei.ch>]

Hi everybody,

this mail has a double purpose.  At the end, there's a call for testers
of a new (planned) Debian ConTeXt package that would be updated more
frequently than now (at least in unstable and testing), where ConTeXt is
tied to teTeX's or TeXlive's release cycles.  But first, I'd like to
talk about 

http://wiki.contextgarden.net/Debian_installation

Are some of the people around who wrote this?  I found some information
in it misleading and in part just wrong (this has already been pointed
out two weaks ago by "plink"), and have started to edit the page to
change the parts that give us, the Debian TeX maintaines, most
headache.  But in the lower part, "Steps to finish a first context
upgrade", I felt lost.  If these steps are really needed, then there's
something seriously wrong in Debian's (and probably upstream's)
packaging of ConTeXt.  Therefore I didn't just change the text to
reflect how I think it should work.  Instead, we should try to figure
out together whether it in fact does not work as it should, and then fix
the Debian packages (hopefully still possible for etch).

So the specific question I have are:

- Is it intended that context formats end up in $TEXMF/web2c/pdfetex/?
  If yes, why is that so?  If not, we should rather find out why it
  happens and fix it.

- Why does it make a difference if the formats are created by fmtutil
  instead of texexec (Except for the output directory)?  Should the
  upstream packaging be changed so that fmtutil is never used, but
  texexec, or should fmtutil be fixed to produce the same as texexec?  



Finally, here comes Norbert Preining's Call for Testers:

Dear all!

We = Debian TeX maintainers searching for users of the Debian Operating
Systems which are also using ConTeXt.

Currently Debian etch (testing) and sid (unstable) contains packages for
TeX live 2005. But this contains a bit old ConTeXt version, so users are
asking us to update ConTeXt.

We have prepared a updated ConTeXt package for Debian, based on the
latest released version (2006.08.08), and would ask you to help use
testing, as we are not experienced in ConTeXt type settings. I checked
some simple documents from the ConTeXt Garden, and they worked, but more
detailed testing would be nice.

If you have interest, please contact us at
	debian-tex-maint@lists.debian.org
or, if you have a bit experience, you can straight away add
	deb http://www.tug.org/texlive/Debian/ context/
to your /etc/apt/sources.list file and install context. After this,
please tell us our experiences/failures/suggestions.

Thanks a lot and all the best


Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)