On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 6:26 PM, Sietse Brouwer wrote:
Hi all,
The "current stable" MkIV, the MkIV on the wiki, and the MkIV in TeX Live are quite different things.
MkIV 2011.005.18 -- result of first-setup.sh --current MkIV 2011.10.008 -- version on the wiki MkIV 2012.005.29 -- version in TeX Live 2012, AFAICT (Mojca?)
Usually it works better if you CC me since there are a lot of emails I recently skip reading (based on subject).
1. Why not declare the version in TeX Live to be stable? I know Mojca puts some work into making it as bug-free as possible.
It was Hans who has put the work into it, but I don't know why he didn't release a public "current" release. I applied some minor patches over 2012.05.29 based on later ConTeXt version, so it's not *exactly* that version, but I had no idea what to do about the date. I have no idea how Hans uploads current versions, but I could make a zip, upload it to CTAN and make it available as current in minimals. (If I forget to do that in less than a week, please remind me.)
3. Is there a list of past stable versions somewhere?
Probably the best answer would be the (unofficial) git repository: http://gitorious.org/context/context I also have a repository on https://github.com/mojca/context It's not updated though - I update from gitorious from time to time, but not automatically. I tried to make sure that even the oldest version have some consistency.
I can't find one, and without it the ability to go to a specific stable version with `sh ./first-setup.sh --context=date` seems a bit useless. (Can't really imagine a use in general, though.)
http://minimals.contextgarden.net/current/context/ Some time ago a new stable version came out at least once per week and betas were rare, for testing features. I think that we asked Hans not to release "current" versions with testing features so often, so that people don't end up with broken ConTeXt. As a consequence he started releasing betas with that pace, but sadly he forgets to release current versions every now and then :( But anyway, manually interfering and making sure that the same version as in TeX Live ends up in minimals (and on the wiki) would not be such a bad idea.
4. (Less important.) context.mkiv defines \contextversion as e.g. `2012.08.11 14:11`, but \contextversionnumber in mult-ini.mkiv still prepends a zero to the month or day. (It checks whether 08 < 10, which is true even if the leading zero is present.) This causes the extra zeros you saw in the version numbers above. Can this be changed without breakage ensuing?
That's for Hans or Wolfgang ... Mojca