location of old ConTeXt versions?
Dear ConTeXters, In order to correct an embarrassing thinko (wrong units of acceleration!) in my book for its next printing, I need to regenerate the PDF changing only that one spot. Thus, I am looking for an old ConTeXt version, 2014.05.17. The latest versions find different page and line breaks. I haven't been able to convince them to rediscover the old breaks (which were carefully optimized over a few miserable weeks back in 2014). I have the 2014.05.17 minimal on my old laptop, a i386 32-bit Linux laptop (2006 vintage). I joined the 2010 decade recently and now use 64-bit laptop; the 32-bit minimals don't work on it. The wiki, at http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Standalone#Reverting_to_an_older_insta..., says that the old versions are available at http://minimals.contextgarden.net/current/context/, where I found only the latest versions. Could you point me to a linux/64-bit minimal for 2014.05.17? I'll update the wiki accordingly. (If the old versions are gone, I'll dig out my old laptop and regenerate it that way, or try convincing the laptop to use 32-bit executables as well.) Best, -- -Sanjoy http://savelongwharfpark.org/ Save Long Wharf Park in Boston Harbor! http://streetfightingmath.com/ Six reasoning tools to make hard problems easy.
On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 2:03 PM, Sanjoy Mahajan
Dear ConTeXters,
In order to correct an embarrassing thinko (wrong units of acceleration!) in my book for its next printing, I need to regenerate the PDF changing only that one spot.
Thus, I am looking for an old ConTeXt version, 2014.05.17. The latest versions find different page and line breaks. I haven't been able to convince them to rediscover the old breaks (which were carefully optimized over a few miserable weeks back in 2014).
I have the 2014.05.17 minimal on my old laptop, a i386 32-bit Linux laptop (2006 vintage). I joined the 2010 decade recently and now use 64-bit laptop; the 32-bit minimals don't work on it.
The wiki, at http://wiki.contextgarden.net/ConTeXt_Standalone#Reverting_to_an_older_insta..., says that the old versions are available at http://minimals.contextgarden.net/current/context/, where I found only the latest versions.
Could you point me to a linux/64-bit minimal for 2014.05.17? I'll update the wiki accordingly. (If the old versions are gone, I'll dig out my old laptop and regenerate it that way, or try convincing the laptop to use 32-bit executables as well.)
This is slightly suboptimal at the moment. My suggestion would be the following: - fetch the latest minimals for 64-bit linux - remove texmf-context and replace it with the one from your old machine (alternatively you could fetch that version of ConTeXt from GIT) - check which version of LuaTeX you have on the old 32-bit box (it's probably beta-0.79.1) - fetch that version from SVN from http://svn.contextgarden.net/suite-bin/tex/x86_64-linux (if it's that version, just checkout r197) - you might need to replace mtxrun from the old version (or maybe I forgot another thing or two) Everything else should keep working unless some font names changed in the meantime. Alternatively start with your old 32-bit tree and just add the texmf-linux-64 tree from the new installation to it (of course make sure to replace luatex and potentially other scripts in that tree). Mojca
Thanks, Mojca. Inspired by your suggestions, I did the following (which should work on Ubuntu too, but I am using Debian testing a.k.a. stretch): $ dpkg --add-architecture i386 $ apt update $ apt install libc6-i386 and voila my old binaries from the minimal worked! There were other issues that aren't so easy to solve: 1. asymptote meanwhile is at version 2.35 instead of 2.31, which affects figure sizes slightly. 2. graphviz and dot (for all the tree diagrams) were at version 2.26 and are now at 2.28, which affects figure sizes somewhat and their layout slightly. 3. Inkscape was 0.48 and is now 0.91. That affected the conversion from svg to eps of one figure. That I worked around by just using the previously converted eps figure instead of the svg. All the changes above can affect the page and line breaks, but I tweaked a bit until that didn't happen. It does show a general problem with large complex documents regarding software versions. ConTeXt is the fastest-changing component, but the other components also change, and one needs a way to preserve the entire software stack. That's a software-engineering problem, and maybe others have found solutions? My first book (_Street-Fighting Mathematics_) is frozen with its typos because I cannot reproduce its stack at all, so all the new printings get the old typos. Through bad luck, at the time (2009) I happened to have a never-released version of the tex fonts, now long overwritten by proper versions, and I also didn't use a ConTeXt minimal back then, so I don't have the other binaries and TeX in the right form. -Sanjoy
On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 6:02 PM, Sanjoy Mahajan
Thanks, Mojca. Inspired by your suggestions, I did the following (which should work on Ubuntu too, but I am using Debian testing a.k.a. stretch):
$ dpkg --add-architecture i386 $ apt update $ apt install libc6-i386
and voila my old binaries from the minimal worked!
There were other issues that aren't so easy to solve:
1. asymptote meanwhile is at version 2.35 instead of 2.31, which affects figure sizes slightly.
2. graphviz and dot (for all the tree diagrams) were at version 2.26 and are now at 2.28, which affects figure sizes somewhat and their layout slightly.
3. Inkscape was 0.48 and is now 0.91. That affected the conversion from svg to eps of one figure. That I worked around by just using the previously converted eps figure instead of the svg.
All the changes above can affect the page and line breaks, but I tweaked a bit until that didn't happen.
It does show a general problem with large complex documents regarding software versions. ConTeXt is the fastest-changing component, but the other components also change, and one needs a way to preserve the entire software stack.
That's a software-engineering problem, and maybe others have found solutions?
My first book (_Street-Fighting Mathematics_) is frozen with its typos because I cannot reproduce its stack at all, so all the new printings get the old typos. Through bad luck, at the time (2009) I happened to have a never-released version of the tex fonts, now long overwritten by proper versions, and I also didn't use a ConTeXt minimal back then, so I don't have the other binaries and TeX in the right form.
Have you seen this site ? http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/ -- luigi
luigi scarso
Have you seen this site ?
Thanks -- that might help! I'm going to try texlive 2010: The last PDF of that book was generated on 2010/05/01 using pdftex and ConTeXt 2009.11.06. The ancient unreleased font that I used might prevent it from working, but my fingers are crossed. -Sanjoy
On Tue, Nov 10, 2015 at 6:21 PM, luigi scarso
Have you seen this site ?
http://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/
-- luigi
hm, by ftp is better ftp://ftp.math.utah.edu/pub/tex/historic/systems/texlive/ -- luigi
Peter Münster
I have context-2014.03.25-16:58 and context-2014.06.22-19:58. If you want, I can prepare 1 or 2 tar-files (or zip) for you.
Peter, I appreciate the kind offer. I remember trying both those versions last year, and they produced different page and line breaks. But, I just found out how to rescue the situation by installing 32-bit compatability libraries (see my previous msg in this thread). -Sanjoy
participants (4)
-
luigi scarso -
Mojca Miklavec -
Peter Münster -
Sanjoy Mahajan