[NTG-context] Re: Number in a circle

On 30 May 2024, at 21:19, Henning Hraban Ramm wrote:

Am 30.05.24 um 19:25 schrieb Kip Warner:

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Is this a message "I'm volunteering to maintain such a ppa" or a message "wouldn't it be nice if someone went out of their way to make my life easier"? Just out of curiosity. Right now it's the latter due to time constraints. Although I have helped a number of free software projects get PPAs up and running. Usually once they're up there's not much to do after. Since ConTeXt is already Debianized by the Debian project, you probably can start with

On Thu, 2024-05-30 at 18:26 +0200, Thomas A. Schmitz wrote: their debian/ folder, edit as needed, and then you should be good. You can also set an automatic build recipe in the PPA so each commit to SCM results in a new nightly. You'll get a lot more people using and testing your newer release this way. Food for thought.

I can assure you the worldwide TeX community has thought about their approach a few times. TeX Live packaging (i.e. mostly LaTeX packaging) is different to Linux packaging. Somebody explained it to me in detail, but I can’t remember… At least TeX Live’s yearly release setup doesn’t fit… well, anything else (I find it annoying). But for release date, many of the active contributors make sure everything fits together.

ConTeXt is different in that the distribution is closely coupled to binary versions. It would be possible to set up a PPA independent of TeX Live, I guess. (Have binary & macros in the same package, maybe docs & fonts separate…) But somebody would have to maintain it.

I'd be able to maintain a Context PPA but there already seems to be one: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/context The dates on that page confuse me, however. It says the last upload of the package was 2023-05-05 but that it somehow contains the Context version from 2024-04-09. I'm not quite sure how that can be the case? Also it's not clear to me whether that PPA is Context alone or TeXlive plus a bunch of TeX stuff including Context? (I could install it of course.) :-) — Bruce Horrocks Hampshire, UK