[luatex] [tex-live] Discussion about packaging binary modules for LuaTeX (& ConTeXt Meeting 2015 in France)

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Fri, Jun 5, 2015 at 9:22 PM, Élie Roux wrote:
>> Assuming that you might be French (judging from your name)
>
> I admit I almost read "judging from your arrogance and stubbornness" :)
>
>> We've been discussing some kind of automated builds of LuaTeX (and
>> other engines) for a while already, and planned to discuss how to
>> integrate automated "swiglib" builds as well.
>
> Good, sorry to make such a noise now, I didn't know this was being
> discussed!

It was being discussed, albeit not with a very high priority. (Some
higher priority tasks are being postponed for years.)

>> TLContrib
>
> I almost forgot about it, but it seems kind of frozen...?

It's true that it's frozen, but:

(a) I guess it's just because Taco was mainly interested in
distributing an up-to-date LuaTeX at the time of setting it up; and
when LuaTeX didn't get any major updates between TL releases, the
repository staled.

(b) You'll have an opportunity to bribe the maintainer with a box of
beer to get it up and running with the latest TL if you come to the
conference.

(c) It's easy enough to set up some independent mirror (as long as you
don't have to deal with user management and only need a set of simple
scrips that would fetch the package content from some well-defined
repository).

>> and some smart scripting hackery might result in some acceptable
>> user-friendly way to get the desired functionality to the users.
>
> Sure, that sounds a good way to go for me: something simple, generic,
> providing binaries for reasonable architectures (I think people using
> CentOS5 should be skilled enough to compile themselves)... If things go
> in that direction, then it's very fine!
>
>> You should consider joining us and hope for a fruitful discussion
>> together with all the "players" (LuaTeX developers, TLContrib
>> hacker, ConTeXt garden packagers etc.).
>
> This seems a good idea (though I've never actually compiled anything
> with ConTeXt); it's not too far from where I live, I'll think about that!

You don't have to be a ConTeXt user in order to attend a meeting.

In fact, a bunch of regular attendants who never use ConTeXt come just
because of the great conference atmosphere. Similar is true for the
Polish user meeting (BachoTeX). Many participants don't understand any
Polish and many don't use any TeX at all. It's just the great
atmosphere, discussions, bonfire, singing etc. that makes people keep
coming back, often with families.

(We also need to make sure that Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard comes to
Nasbinals. Then we can organize a "parallel" hyphenation meeting as
well ;)

Mojca