[luatex] latest 'fixes' don't fix....again.

[Ulrike Fischer]

Am Fri, 10 May 2013 19:27:20 +0100 schrieb Robin Fairbairns:

> 
>> And the luatex sites claims (or - as the text is quite old - perhaps
>> better "claimed") that only major updates (x.x0 versions) "are
>> stable enough to be used for production work". 
> 
> one man's minor update is another's game breaker; i wouldn't criticise
> the luatex team, here.

It wasn't meant as critic. It only explains why miktex didn't rush
to update to 0.75 or 0.76.

> 
>> Until a few days an update of the binary would have been highly
>> problematic as a lot of packages didn't work with the newer luatex.
>> So imho it is not a bad idea to keep a stable system for some time. 
>> 
>> (But it would be useful to have a newer version for tests parallel
>> to the stable system).
> 
> there seemed to me to be a coherent structure, of a tex live "testing"
> repository against which "interested experts" could perform
> experiments.  this seems to have gone rather severely off the rails, for
> a number of reasons ... not least that the ctan team has been merrily
> updating luatex-related packages on the archive, as they were supplied
> to us.  i don't know what would have been best, but it's clearly an item
> for discussion of "next time".
> 
> so, the process needs to be rethought for another year.  for now, i
> would claim that those involved should try to make the best of a bad
> job; proposals for a better process for next year would be useful, but
> we can surely now take the failures of process "as read", and plough on
> with the actual work the testing version is there for.

Actually I'm quite happy currently: something is happening with
lualatex/luaotfload. The changes and the work currently done by
various people - even if they mean that one has to struggle a bit to
get everything working again - made me quite optimistic regarding
the future of lualatex. I don't mind problems if I can see a way to
solve them. 

-- 
Ulrike Fischer 
http://www.troubleshooting-tex.de/