[dev-context] TeXLive 2006

[Aditya Mahajan]

On Sun, 10 Dec 2006, Taco Hoekwater wrote:

> Taco Hoekwater wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I have good news as well as bad news.
> > 
> > The good news is that the coming TeXLive will be nicely up to date
> > when it comes to ConTeXt (currently at 2006.12.07).
> 
> In fact, I believe we should consider retracting ConTeXt from TeXLive
> perminently (for TL2007, we have already made promises for TL2006).
>
> [reasons snipped]
>

This is indeed a very sad affair of things. IMO, ConTeXt not being 
included in TL is fine, as long as there is alternative. Right now, 
installing ConTeXt on windows is not a problem. I have introduced some 
of my friends to ConTeXt, and I simply recommend downloading the 
stand-alone distribution from Pragma. Most people do have MikTeX, but 
MikTeX's support for ConTeXt is/was partially broken, and does not 
keep pace with ConTeXt's development.

>From what I have heard/read, on OSX gwTeX has good support for 
ConTeXt and it is also the most popular OSX tex distribution.

This leaves *nix. Now that tetex is dead, most distributions are 
switching to TL. Is there an alternative way of using ConTeXt which 
will work out of the box---something equivalent to the stand-alone 
distribution for Windows. If there is, then we can just ask a *nix 
user to use that alternative.

There have been efforts by debian maintainers to get proper support 
for ConTeXt, so I think that all Debian based flavours will have 
proper ConTeXt support. There was also a rpm package by Peter Munser 
(IIRC), but I think that it was based on TL. Is there an alternative 
to other flavours of *nix? The installation instructions on the wiki 
for linux are intimidating. I guess that is because of the general 
mess in tetex and texlive towards ConTeXt, but there has to a simpler 
alternative.

Aditya