[pdftex] Latest version

[Robin Fairbairns]

ben crowell wrote, quoting me:
> >we simply mirror pdftex from the official archive; _that's_ where we
> >fondly assume the knowledge resides.  if they choose not to link the
> >most recent snapshots into the parent directory, who are we to do it
> >for them?
>
> Sorry, but I just don't follow your reasoning here. We all know that the
> links are to old, nonfunctional versions. So clearly you /don't/
> "fondly assume" that they're links to new, good versions.

i merely fondly assume that there's a good reason that there's no link
to snapshots of things called "1.00-pretest" (or the like).  i don't
think that's particularly unreasonable on our part.

> >if you don't like the situation, why not volunteer your effort in
> >maintaining pdftex?  it may very well be that pdftex's problems arise
> >from shortage of workers.
> Normally when web site A has a stale link to web site B, I notify the
> maintainer of web site A. I don't volunteer to take over maintenance of
> either web site.

the difference is that we're not web sites; we're ftp sites, and we
maintain consistency between ourselves by mirror, which is an
automatic mechanism.  doing something other than what the pdftex
master site is doing is a pita, and i really can't be bothered,
particularly since i know the pdftex master site doesn't even contain
any snapshot for the intervening 6 months of development.

> I don't see any evidence that pdftex has problems, so I don't think we
> need to speculate that these nonexistent problems are due to a
> shortage of workers.

6 months of development, leading to new versions in the popular
distributions of tex, and not a single snapshot?  no problems?  i
boggle.

> I have to admit that I'm perplexed by this whole thing. Why is it so hard
> to update a stale link?

because there aren't any "links", as you seem to be thinking of them.
there are file system links we mirror from the pdftex master site.
and not a single one of those is "stale" -- otherwise it would be
caught by my periodic "dangling links" job.

i could, at the expense of a few keystrokes (as you so rightly
observe) create an fs link to one of these directories.  i could even
possibly make it propagate a bit around ctan.  but it would disappear
within 24 hours, unless i took steps to ensure that all the ctan
sites, in parallel, updated their mirror parameters.