On Thu, 24 Oct 2013, Lars Huttar wrote:

> Hello,
> I was looking into simplefonts
> (http://wiki.contextgarden.net/simplefonts) and noticed the clause
>
>> if you’re running ConTeXt Standalone
>> <http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Standalone> (which is a better
>> option)
>
> Well I'm using TeXLive, but am happy to take good advice, so I looked at
> http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Standalone to see why it would be
> a better option.
> The basic reason I can see is that Standalone is updated more frequently.

Three or four years ago, when ConTeXt was moving from MkII to MkIV, 
you had to run through hoops to get context working with TL. Since the 
last two years, ConTeXt works out of the box in TL.

> So if you're using bleeding-edge features of ConTeXt (including recent
> fixes to simplefonts?), I can see wanting to use Standalone and have
> access to the latest features and fixes.
>
> On the other hand, if you're working on a large production project that
> has to be careful of stability, is there any advantage to Standalone
> over TeXLive? Sure, you can keep a standalone version frozen in place,
> but then that seems equivalent to staying with an existing version of
> TeXLive.

No. In some sense, it is better to use the frozen version that is part of 
TL rather than an arbitrary beta version from standalone. Every once in a 
while, the beta version has bugs (those are usually fixed in a matter of 
hours). But it can be tricky to decide which version to freeze for a long 
term production environment.

On the other hand, the version of ConTeXt that ships with TL is tested 
more thoroughly. So, there is some guarantee that it will not include any 
serious bugs.

Aditya