Re: Is Minimals ready for non-developers to use? (Tom)

[Mojca Miklavec <mojca.miklavec.lists@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Mar 14, 2011 at 14:22, Tom wrote:
> Dalyoung,
>
> To the contrary, You have been most helpful. Installing the latest version
> of Minimals worked fine but I wonder why they even advertise that there is a
> stable version to be downloaded.

When minimals were created, a new "stable" version was released
approximately once a week. It used to be a problem to get the beta
version working since beta often depended on a new version of luatex
(which was also released every two/three weeks, but often not
synchronized with ConTeXt releases).

Now Hans only releases a stable version twice a year or so. The
problem is that minimals have not been designed with that in mind and
there is only a single version of texmfcnf.lua and only a single
version of luatex binary. Consequently minimals can only work either
with beta or with current when the two versions diverge, but not with
both and beta has priority.

I need to change the way the distribution works entirely, from the
grounds up (I have many parts ready, but not ready to publish yet).

An easy solution would be to create another mirror and only provide a
working current version there.

> I guess they mean a stable version of MKII.
> I had the same experience that you had with the Introduction not showing up
> in the TOC. Do you know how to report a bug?

You don't need to report it. I'm aware of that flaw. I could do a
temporary fix, but I would prefer to fix it properly. I'm sorry that
it alredy took me several years to address those issues, but I promise
to fix it before the conference. Properly.

You also need to keep in mind that even though it is advertized as
stable, bugs won't be fixed (many project often have at least two
branches of development - one for fixing the released version and one
for real development; the released version should get bugfixes, but in
context development that doesn't and won't happen unless some
volunteer starts carefully checking the new code and only applies
bugfixes to the stable version).

So most people that use ConTeXt actively need bugfixes very often and
the only way to get the bugs fixed is to use the latest version. Well,
latest version comes with its own bugs, but at least you have a chance
to get them fixed quickly.

Mojca
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