[NTG-context] beta vs current

[Hans Hagen]

On 1/30/2020 9:56 PM, Henri Menke wrote:
> On 1/31/20 8:37 AM, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
>> On Thu, 30 Jan 2020, Hans Hagen wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> Already for quite some years the 'current' context release is the one
>>> that ends up on texlive. The rest of the year we talk about betas and
>>> very rarely an alpha release. This distinction no longer makes sense.
>>>
>>>  From now on there will be no alpha, beta or current (with latest begin
>>> the most recent of the three, when present): we only will have latest.
>>> Most users follow the latest anyway and keeping a copy of some tree is
>>> cheap.
>>>
>>> There will of course be the yearly tex live snapshots and these will
>>> have the year attached to them.
>>>
>>> So, effectively nothing changes, apart from the fact that we no longer
>>> use the labels (and distinction on the website).
>>
>> I like this change.
>>
>>> A more fundamental distinction is between the versions:
>>>
>>> pdftex|xetex     : mkii (probaly not used that much any longer)
>>> luatex|luajittex : mkiv (also the test for luatex dev)
>>> luametatex       : lmtx (the (upcoming) real deal)
>>>
>>> Mojca and I are diuscussing / working on an upgrade of the context
>>> garden installations and repositories but more about that later,
>>
>> Will lmtx be available on the next texlive?
> 
> Probably not, LuaMetaTeX sources are not public yet, so TeX Live can't
> build it and I don't think they are going to just pull binaries into the
> tree.  They are also very cautious with licensing, so unless something
> is truly open source they won't pull it (e.g. https://ctan.org/pkg/pgf-pie).
the original idea was to have it ready (source code and binaries and so) 
but tl is already too far into freezing code etc so it would not be 
integrated anyway (testing, installation etc) and therefore our schedule 
could be delayed and we now take our time to properly organize the new 
infrastructure on the garden as well as make sure it compiles nicely on 
all platforms that we want (using the buildbot infrastructure) which in 
turn triggers other things

regarding luametatex being open source .. it will (as already announced) 
end up as part of the distribution but i don't want to push all that 
intermediate stuff in there (we have some quality standards, whatever 
one might think of that) and we're not in that hurry anyway

so, tex live will ship the luatex/mkiv combination and mojca, alan and i 
i will think of a good moment to release the rest

(and maybe next year we will make lmtx the default for tex live .. who 
knows; there is no reason to complicate installation by adding choices)

Hans

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                                           Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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