Matthias Wächter wrote:
Is there a strong motivation against having versioned package file names, possibly with some months/years of history? Has this support feature ever been considered by pragma-ade or asked for by their (non-)paying customers? Or is this archive available but I am unable to find it? ;)
here we seldom use specific version; we do have project specific minimal trees because different projects demand different commercial fonts, and there are situations where experimental features are used that are not yet stable. on a local ox one can do things like: /distributions/context-20050518/.... which we initialize with setuptex (see minimal distribution) and or by using texmfstart --tree (see manual) taco has a complete archive
Just an example:
Instead of http://www.pragma-ade.nl/context/current/cont-tmf.zip
use a browseable directory like http://www.pragma-ade.nl/context/archive/ containint files like http://www.pragma-ade.nl/context/archive/cont-tmf-20060518.zip http://www.pragma-ade.nl/context/archive/cont-tmf-20060601.zip http://www.pragma-ade.nl/context/archive/cont-tmf-20060629.zip
and possibly set /context/current/cont-tmf.zip as an internal file system link to the latest file in /context/archive/ for those interested only in the latest version. The proposed method could be applied to all other download files as well.
That way and as long as the archive files are available, a precise version of Context could be fetched from pragma-ade's server without maintaining a local versioned archive of cont.tmf.zip etc. Referral to a specific version of Context would be a lot easier, and documenting the tools used for a project would be a lot simpler. A common understanding of a Context version,
although windows (on which we develop context) provides different link systems i seldom use them; also, the server has just a copy of my local stuff and not more; the toolkit is upward compatible as much as possible (at least in functional terms); the most sensitive parts of tex setups are the fonts (but that will simplify in the near future with new versions of pdftex and open type)
reflected in its package file name, would reduce the effort of those responsible for local version control and install package maintenance.
taco maintains a svn repository on the gforce server at superlec ; in principle one can rebuild older versions from there however, the best way to archive is to use the minimal distributions (or your own ones built of them) because context files are just part of the story: fonts, patterne etc also play a role; in a year or so, you we hope to be able to run dirtectly from zip files, which makes live even more simple Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------