Re: Rolling out a pandoc-context publication workflow in an organization

[Hans Hagen <j.hagen@xs4all.nl>]

On 7/2/2021 9:38 AM, Jan U. Hasecke wrote:
> 
> Am 02.07.21 um 01:07 schrieb Bruce Horrocks:
>> One option you might try, if your cooperative has a web-server 
>> available to editors, is to store your own ConTeXt repository. That 
>> way you can update the LMTX version when you are ready to.
>>
>> This works because "install.sh" can have a "--server" parameter 
>> supplied. By default it goes to lmtx.pragma-ade.com/install-lmtx but 
>> if you were to copy the install-lmtx directory and host the copy on 
>> your own server at the same path, then you could 'freeze' your LMTX 
>> version until you were ready to change.
> 
> 
> Thanks for this hint.
> 
> This might solve one more problem. We would like to pin the installation 
> to a version that is known too work.
> 
> BTW: Are there plans to use a GitHub repository or an alternative to it? 
> As that would ease pinning a bit.
All uploads end up here too alsk kind of an archive:

official    : https://bitbucket.org/phg/context-mirror/src/beta/
experimental : https://github.com/mojca/context2

The official oen can be checked out, the experimental one is a 
playground because for quite a while Mojca and I have some ideas for a 
more extensive install on github which would then involve:

-- core context code (with luametatex in source tree too: 
tex/texmf-context in the distribution

-- the minimal set of resources: tex/texmf in the distribution

-- binaries (which is the more complex part)

-- modules: texmf/modules

So, basically several repositories alongside (totaling to the amoutn we 
now have in the zips). We then have doif-it-yourself-zips, the garden 
installer, the lmtx self updater and install-from-github as 
alternatives. I have a sort of proof of concept for it. We looked into 
the binary bit and things have changed a bit over the years so maybe 
it's more doable now.

One of the complications is always that it depends on helper programs:

- zips are easy as all systems have it (ok, some linux distributions 
don't install unzip but one can easily add it)

- the garden install needs a matching rsync (we need to ship on for 
windows and sometimes a mismatch will require an update on other 
platforms); it reminds me that we have to swap the cygwin bins by mingw 
bins; anyway. one problem is that organizations block the port

- the lmtx installer needs a (luametatex) binary which is no big deal; 
it uses http and there might be organizations that demand https and ssl 
keeps evolving so in the long run it can fail to update older 
installations (it anyway means that we need to also ship e.g. curl or 
libcurl (the later works ok for us); no big deal but more work)

- a github install demands that git is installed; that itself is a big 
piece of software (a small git binary for windows is already 200 MB due 
to all the dependencies while actually we only need a stupid fetch); the 
gh binary is still 25M but might be a solution, apart from the fact that 
we then expect users to have a recent bin ... will a 5 year old 
installation update?); of course users can also decide to completely do 
it themselves (check out etc) but for a local project-specific run one 
doesn't want all those gigs

So, each approach has pros and cons, and we need to prevent lock into 
some specific technology.

Hans

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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