[tex-live] status report on TL? (LaTeX release)

Gerben Wierda Sherlock at rna.nl
Sat Jul 26 19:12:21 CEST 2003


On Saturday, Jul 26, 2003, at 15:13 Europe/Amsterdam, Karl Berry wrote:

>     1. Image = CD = published version, major number (i.e. TL7 TL8). The
>
> Agreed, except we're calling it TL2003 now, not TL8.

Which is more restricted but I do not care.

>     2. source tree. Updated once a while when fixes and improvements 
> have
>
> It seems to me the source should always match what is being
> distributed.  In fact, it pretty much has to.

I strongly disagree. Stable situations during TeX development and 
maintenance occur far more often than a CD release. For me this has 
been essential in providing a 'living but stable' TeX to the Mac OS X 
community. If I would have to draw these regular but important updates 
(e.g. a new stable version of pdfTeX appears) from the 
source.development tree I would have to cope with a lot of 
instabilities.

Over the last years, source has been updated once in Aa while from 
source.development when source.development was in a stable state (the 
end of a change-test cycle)

The image could be seen as a frozen state of the source tree.

>     It is probably not a good idea to have a second image.
>
> I guess you mean a second development image, as I was half-heartedly
> mentioning as a possibility.  I don't really like the idea of making a
> new release that is only for the web, I was just responding to Thomas.

Why not? The fact is that the web offers a smaller range (not the 
entire Master tree) but it can keep people up to date with important 
changes when they have stabilized. What is against using the web as a 
companion of the CD? Why restrict?

> I think the current situation, where we have last year's release
> (obviously frozen) and current development, is fine.  IMHO,
> source.development simply causes confusion and should be excised.  But
> it's not up to me.

If the we would only have a source tree, my whole 'service' would break 
down. I will not distribute as my main redistribution anything based on 
a development tree.

> Meanwhile, let's concentrate on getting this year's release done :).

Of course. But this issue is of vital importance to my work. Without a 
regular update of source from source.development my work becomes rather 
undoable.

G
--
"To be or not to be, that is the question" -- Parmenides



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