Hi Hans, On Sat, 2025-06-14 at 09:41 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
On 6/14/2025 8:47 AM, Max Chernoff via ntg-context wrote: i wonder if a too frequent texlive sync is good, as it sounds pretty beta
My thinking was that if it's stable enough for the users of the Standalone Distribution (many of whom use ConTeXt professionally), then it should be stable enough for TeX Live. The build script tries compiling a very basic test document https://github.com/gucci-on-fleek/maxchernoff.ca/blob/master/builder/contain... and aborts if it doesn't give the expected output, so the TL version should never be *completely* broken. And it's pretty common for new LaTeX releases to break lots of documents; people have posted tons of duplicates of this question https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/735500 in this past week. Even the perpetually-stable pdfTeX had a few bugs earlier this year.
and isn't tex live also in linux distributions?
Yes, but almost all the distros base their packages off of the annual ISOs, most of which are severely outdated (TL23 and older are common): https://repology.org/project/texlive/versions https://repology.org/project/texlive-base/versions
maybe some delay is better; is there some policy wrt that in texlive?
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.
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).
(i wondered about a warning of using a different than default papersize as set up by texlve - i saw that it's optional in the installer - [...] but i'll think about it; manuals are rendered assuming A4)
I tried convincing Karl to let me remove the system-dependent paper stuff (which I added in the first place at his request), but he wants to keep it for consistency with the other formats.
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] Thanks, -- Max