On Sat, 25 Jan 2020 23:58:27 +0100
Mojca Miklavec
On Sat, 25 Jan 2020 at 23:40, Henri Menke wrote:
It would be really cool if ConTeXt LMTX had a/the official repository.
There will never be an “official repository” for ConTeXt.
There will probably be an official repository soon (even if created by extracting and committing the zips from the website).
As it stands ConTeXt also does not accept “Pull Requests”,
Maybe not pull requests, but Hans happily accepts any patches. Committing code to GitHub and sending Hans a link should be a valid form of a patch :)
because it is developed by PRAGMA ADE for their and only their purposes.
This couldn't be further from the truth.
First of all: PRAGMA *IS* Hans, and everything being developed there is done by Hans and Hans only, most of the time with absolutely zero benefits for the business (or more likely actively hurting the business as he might be working on interesting features requested by users rather than boring stuff required for customers), and most of the time outside of regular working hours (nights, weekends, ...).
Second: tons of features have been added on user requests, and because Hans likes challenges. Not because pragma required or approved it.
Context (and luametatex) is developed by a small, active community who formed the Context Group, open to all. Beyond Hans (at Pragma-ADE), there are many other contributors. Being open source does not require that there be a "repository", rather that the source (to Context) be freely available. As it is a macro package, everyone who uses Context has it all on their computer. It is also distributed by TUG with TeXlive. luametatex is an experimental development/cleanup, lean version of luatex. As it is under very active and very experimental development, the source code has not yet been included with the distribution but this is the intention and will be. As it is still going through major rearrangements, cleanups, and simplifications, is has not yet for lack of time and to keep on track. Again, the aim is for the luametatex code to be distributed with the Context macro source code, also for users to be able to compile quickly and easily for any platform.
The fact that ConTeXt is availble open source to the public and that Hans replies to bugs that don't affect his own work is merely a nice gesture of PRAGMA to the community.
Of Hans personally, not PRAGMA. (OK, the single coworker of his had to agree on Hans wasting so much time doing crazy things.)
One must not neglect the contributions of many others, including Mojca. One must also recognize the efforts of the developers and maintainers of the luatex engine, solidly anchored in the entire TeX community. Alan