Re: Stable versions of MkIV

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

On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 6:26 PM, Sietse Brouwer wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> The "current stable" MkIV, the MkIV on the wiki, and the MkIV in TeX
> Live are quite different things.
>
> MkIV 2011.005.18 -- result of first-setup.sh --current
> MkIV 2011.10.008 -- version on the wiki
> MkIV 2012.005.29 -- version in TeX Live 2012, AFAICT (Mojca?)

Usually it works better if you CC me since there are a lot of emails I
recently skip reading (based on subject).

> 1. Why not declare the version in TeX Live to be stable? I know Mojca
> puts some work into making it as bug-free as possible.

It was Hans who has put the work into it, but I don't know why he
didn't release a public "current" release. I applied some minor
patches over 2012.05.29 based on later ConTeXt version, so it's not
*exactly* that version, but I had no idea what to do about the date.

I have no idea how Hans uploads current versions, but I could make a
zip, upload it to CTAN and make it available as current in minimals.
(If I forget to do that in less than a week, please remind me.)

> 3. Is there a list of past stable versions somewhere?

Probably the best answer would be the (unofficial) git repository:
    http://gitorious.org/context/context
I also have a repository on
    https://github.com/mojca/context
It's not updated though - I update from gitorious from time to time,
but not automatically. I tried to make sure that even the oldest
version have some consistency.

> I can't find
> one, and without it the ability to go to a specific stable version
> with
> `sh ./first-setup.sh --context=date` seems a bit useless. (Can't
> really imagine a use in general, though.)

http://minimals.contextgarden.net/current/context/

Some time ago a new stable version came out at least once per week and
betas were rare, for testing features. I think that we asked Hans not
to release "current" versions with testing features so often, so that
people don't end up with broken ConTeXt. As a consequence he started
releasing betas with that pace, but sadly he forgets to release
current versions every now and then :(

But anyway, manually interfering and making sure that the same version
as in TeX Live ends up in minimals (and on the wiki) would not be such
a bad idea.

> 4. (Less important.) context.mkiv defines \contextversion as e.g.
> `2012.08.11 14:11`, but \contextversionnumber in mult-ini.mkiv still
> prepends a zero to the month or day. (It checks whether 08 < 10, which
> is true even if the leading zero is present.) This causes the extra
> zeros you saw in the version numbers above. Can this be changed
> without breakage ensuing?

That's for Hans or Wolfgang ...

Mojca
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