[tex-hyphen] versioning hyphenation patterns

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Mon, Jun 16, 2008 at 6:17 AM, Werner LEMBERG wrote:
>
> Mojca, have you ever thought about pattern versions?  One of the very
> first emails to the tex-hyphen mailing list discusses that.  Since
> luatex will support selection of patterns as a run-time operation (at
> least this is what I remember), this might become an issue.

At the very beginnig Karl said something like:
- please no pattern version in the name

Do you have any suggestion about how to use the versioned files?

One particular idea that comes to my mind would be the following:
- tex/generic/hyph-utf8/patterns/hyph-foo.tex always contains the
latest version of patterns (that's what has always been the case in
distributions); "patterns" could be renamed to something else if you
have a better suggestion
- tex/generic/hyph-utf8/versioned (or some other name; or some other
package that could be put to the same repository, but only available
to people that want to use it, not to everyone - it can grow large)
provides files like hyph-de-1996-x-2008-06-16.tex
- loadhyph-de-1996.tex (or maybe pattern-loader.tex) should be able to
access some global variable from somewhere to tell it what version of
patterns nees to be loaded, so it can work like that:

\if <there-is-some-global-variable-that-signals-a-different-version-available>
    \input hyph-foo-\version.tex
\else
    \input hyph-foo.tex
\fi

I need to admit that I don't have the slightest idea about how pattern
loading via language.dat works. It's quite possible that it needs to
be extended in that case, but I'm the wrong person to ask.

Mojca