Suggested feature: Portable document archive

[Simon Heisterkamp]

That is a fair point. I have the following to offer:
- Unfortunately not everyone uses version control. Especially the proposed
target audience for this feature, is unlikely to be comfortable with
text-based tools like that. For those of us that do use version control, I
propose the following:
- The archive that I described as zipped could just as well be an unpacked
folder while maintaining all the features I described. In fact it could be
up to the user to pack/unpack the document in a "Save As" dialogue.
This now opens up the ability to version-control the sources while also
having the ability to "pack and share". Mac OSX ".app" applications are an
example of how this could be done. Most people think of them as files,
when in fact they are folders.

I have had no feedback on the MikTeX issue tracker so far. The issue that
you brought up and the solution that I proposed above are a perfect example
of how this idea needs some constructive dialogue before even getting into
an implementation phase, so thank you for engaging with the idea. Once we
have a more cohesive picture of how the feature could look I will update
the MikTeX issue tracker.

Best,
Simon


On Sun, 29 Dec 2019 at 01:50, Johannes Hielscher <jhielscher at posteo.de>
wrote:

> > Aspects that need more thought:
>
> - You will lose archiveability/dedup/diff/searchability and ease of
>   tracking with version control systems. This will make many grep and
>   git/hg/svn/… users unhappy, and voids one of the major upsides of
>   TeX against “binary” document systems (as long as you don't want to
>   introduce fancy pre-commit hook ninja stunts).
>
>
> This applies as well to MikTeX, so feel free to add this aspect to
> the upstream discussion!
>
>
> Don't get me wrong. I'm somewhat intrigued from this idea, but don't
> want to wake up some next morning to find out that I've locked out of
> my own workflow.
>
>
> Best,
> Johannes
>
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