On 23-9-2010 7:52, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

Hello,

I do not plan changes until three weeks from now, but I have just realized that: - pdfTeX hardly keeps changing at all

indeed, we can just stick to the regular tex live binaries and update once per year

- XeTeX hardly keeps changing at all (there have been some recent changes in microtypography though)

idem

- there are constant problems with building pdfTeX and XeTeX on different platforms - ConTeXt is leaving pdfTeX and XeTeX behind

and even then, there are no changes needed as no new functionality shows up

- both developers of pdfTeX and XeTeX seem to be pretty busy, so bug reports in building process for both of them rarely get fixed - building LuaTeX trunk hardly makes any sense unless it's done on daily basis which nobody does or is willing to do (apart for testing the building process and reporting problems before the official beta is released)

indeed, although it's best to stick to versions that have proved to work ok

- metapost is being built together with luatex - TeX Live 2010 has just been released, so binaries from TeX Live should do their job

indeed

As a consequence, I plan to change the whole building process into a single step: - just build the latest luatex beta - take luatex and metapost from that build - take everything else from TeX Live - (maybe try to build luatex trunk, but don't commit it into repository)

makes sense; maybe only update pdftex/xetex when there is a reason

Any objections or other comments?

(I feel that frequent building of pdfTeX and XeTeX could help find the problems in building much faster than during the lenghty TL production, but if developers are not too responsive, that hardly helps. When we started the minimals, all kinds of new functionality has been added to XeTeX that was crucial for proper functionality of ConTeXt in XeTeX, but I don't know of any other recent addition with that kind of influence.)

you're right, we need to assess this regularly and indeed there is no real reason for pdftex/xetex etc; both moving targets luatex and mp are covered in parallel so that's ok (ok, we still depend on akira's updates but we can only take the few bins we need) I expect the same to happen with fonts ... eventually lm/gyre/... will be stable Hans ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | voip: 087 875 68 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------

Any objections or other comments?

Not from me, I find that's a really good process.

I feel that frequent building of pdfTeX and XeTeX could help find the problems in building much faster than during the lenghty TL production, but if developers are not too responsive, that hardly helps.

I think you've outlined both the problem and its solution in this sentence: it would help to build all the binaries frequently, *but* it's hard to get quick responses from all the binary builders, *hence* it's more efficient to work at a slower pace, i.e. by releasing about once in a year. Plus, it gets work off your hand and shifts the burden to Karl and Peter :-)

When we started the minimals, all kinds of new functionality has been added to XeTeX that was crucial for proper functionality of ConTeXt in XeTeX, but I don't know of any other recent addition with that kind of influence.

Right. There's a kind of balance to it, I think: XeTeX development was most active in 2004--2006, then LuaTeX took over and the focus shifted, etc. It's unlikely that two different extensions of the TeX engine would be actively developed at the same time over a long period. Arthur