Hi Hans, On Sat, 2025-06-14 at 11:45 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
in this past week. Even the perpetually-stable pdfTeX had a few bugs earlier this year.
oh ... i thought that pdftex was very stable and admit that i never check mkii with that (i just assume that when we can make a mkii format we're fine)
I remember the one bug being a spacing issue that only showed up with very specific documents, the other bug I accidentally introduced while fixing a different bug (oops). Both bugs were fixed before TL25 was released (or maybe it was shortly after?), so MkII should be fine.
Karl updates the packages in TL every day; most days there are 3--8 different packages that get updated. And it's pretty common for packages to be updated multiple times in a week (often after a new major version was released), and there are a few packages that are consistently updated almost every week.
hm, times have changed ... (i wonder how that impacts users who expect for instance fonts and patterns to be the same over time but maybe they juist don't update or at least not hit the update button without checking)
Most of the font authors are pretty careful to not change the metrics in updates, so that's not usually a big deal. But hyphenation patterns definitely change, so most users who care about identical page breaks will just use a frozen (and usually ancient) version of TeX Live and never upgrade.
like monthly update or so that we can then adapt to?
Sure, I can reduce the update frequency if you want; right now it's set to check for updates daily, but it's easy to change it to every second day/weekly/monthly/etc. My thinking was that since all software has bugs, frequent updates in TL will shorten the interval between people reporting bugs and them receiving the fix. Or I can let the autoupdater run daily most of the time, but then disable it during the weeks of BachoTeX and the ConTeXt Meeting (when updates tend to be more frequent).
let's for now keep an eye on matters and evaluate later
Ok, sounds good to me. Let me know if/when you want me to change anything.
but that is a bit hard to catch realiable
If the file "context-papersize.tex" exists (full path:
$TEXMFCONFIG/tex/context/user/context-papersize.tex
), then the user has ran "sudo tlmgr paper [letter|a4]"; otherwise, TeX Live will use the default settings. So the only case that you should need to check for is if "context-papersize.tex" contains the following contents:
\setuppapersize[letter][letter]
if maybe just if that file is there, right?
If you run "tlmgr paper a4" the file will contain \setuppapersize[A4][A4] which is probably not worth warning over. Thanks, -- Max