[NTG-context] Version Numbers in Download File Names

[Hans Hagen]

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.
>   
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;
> 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, 
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  

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