July 1st: Beginners TeX Hour: Why Software Sucks: Geeks Drive Stick Shift Cars

[Boris Veytsman]

ZW> From: Zdenek Wagner <zdenek.wagner at gmail.com>
ZW> Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2021 15:30:52 +0200


ZW> the situation is even more complex, you even must have the same OS.
ZW> Many years ago happened to us, when I was asked to develop a macro
ZW> package for a journal and we had the same version of TeX Live, the
ZW> same version of DejaVu fonts, yet the article compiled from the same
ZW> sources by XeLaTeX in Linux was one page shorter than the same done on
ZW> Mac. For some reason font handling was different. Versioning of DejaVu
ZW> fonts is important and downgrading DejaVu might require downgrade of
ZW> fontspec whcih may lead to domino effect requiring downgrade of
ZW> everything.


Docker seems to be a way to solve this problem.  A Docker image is a
complete archival copy of the state of your system.

Of course there is no guarantee Docker images created today are going
to be executable on the machines 150 years from now - even if we do
not ruin the civilization before this.

-- 
Good luck

-Boris

Whoever has lived long enough to find out what life is, knows how deep a debt
of gratitude we owe to Adam, the first great benefactor of our race.  He
brought death into the world.
		-- Mark Twain, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar"