fdu.xiaojf@gmail.com wrote:
Vyatcheslav Yatskovsky wrote:
Dear Patrtic,
... ConTeXt would probably stabilize, which IMHO is not a good thing. One thing I really love ConTeXt for is the speed new techniques are adopted (pdf features, luatex,...) One day we might have a ConTeXt MKII book for those who are afraid of swithing to pdftex2.
ConTeXt should be eventually stabilized so that someone can make some use of it. But, there is a way for rapid adopting of new techniques too.
My experience of using open-source products (I'm best familiar with Moodle) suggest that there should be overlapping cycles in development: 1. Allocate new version number and start implementing new features. Many things are broken at the moment and the version becomes unusable for production purposes.
in addition to taco's answer:
i seldom do big chances in the distributed version; actually, i always use the alpha/beta/whatever in production here;
2. Stabilize this version and make definite release (number x.x.). Now it can be used for production. 3. Continue resolve bugs in this version AND perform Step 1 IN PARALLEL.
you can consider the tex live versions the formal stable versions -)
fyi: the real experimental stuff is in mkiv code and only a few have this on their machines; it's not in alpha/beta releases at all keep in mind that a more complex versioning model will put my/taco's time for 'paid' work even more under pressure
Moodle follows this model and I always wandered how smooth it was to migrate between releases. Everything is completely predictable. Please, look at http://download.moodle.org/ to get the idea of their versioning.
I think ConTeXt needs similar versioning model badly. Now it has rather naive model (release dates) that doesn't help in deciding about stability at all.
I strongly agree that ConTeXt needs an improved versioning model.
in principle you can take any version you want from the svn repos (nicely packages in zips btw) 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 -----------------------------------------------------------------