Hello Taco, >> I see. It's just that literally everything about ConTeXt is >> changing on a daily basis and almost every current answer about >> just any topic seems to be outdated within a fortnight. > > Well, what else do you expect from code that is in active development? > > Sorry, but this rant does not make a lot of sense. Context MKIV > and Luatex are *not* production systems, and we do not claim they > are. If you are unhappy with code that is in still moving fast, > stick to MKII. MKII has been pretty stable for years now.
I'm perfectly aware of the fact that MKIV isn't ready for prime time yet. Still I remember that from one MKII release to the next bugs kept creeping into the code that suddenly broke everything. Wrecked font handling in combination with XeTeX around the beginning of last year comes to my mind as just one of the topics people were having trouble with. From personal experience in the middle of a project at that time I also remember a few other problems with MKII ... besides I was having the impression that for each new MKII release that didn't solve a specific bug you'd have to adapt the original workaround. So compared to MKIV I certainly agree with you that MKII is pretty stable, but in comparison with other projects probably not stable enough for many users. In my opinion this is the very reason why that discussion about quality assurance and regression testing came up at all during the conference in Epen last March. And this is also why I made the comment about the ever changing ConTeXt. Additionally, from the point of view of a package developer I keep having the feeling that more often than not the reasons for certain changes are left in the dark rather than explained. For example, my understanding is that many Perl scripts have been superseded by Ruby scripts over time, still they're shipped with current MKII minimals. Unfortunately there's no documentation about whether they could actually be deleted or whether there are still some (rare) tasks they're needed for. And then they seem to access dozens of environment variables and configuration files so you have no clue about whether those are needed or not. You just have to know. Which I don't. When I was trying to put together a Mac installer for MKII a couple of months ago I kept hearing the same definitely maybes about this configuration data issue as the ones I'm facing now -- only at that time the game wasn't called LuaTeX. Not having had the time to reverse engineer everything I gave up then. Recently I had the chance to work on the Mac installer again and after some progress I got stuck at the very same vital point called configuration information and how it's accessed. > I wrote that message yesterday to let you know that we are actively > working to make the situation better. It quite a cold shower to get > flamed for doing exactly that. > > Taco Admittedly, I phrased my comment rather provocatively ... if you feel offended personally I apologize. I appreciate very much what both you and Hans do. Otherwise I wouldn't use ConTeXt at all and even more certainly wouldn't be concerned with a Mac package for it. Still I find the current situation rather frustrating ... in fairness I think this is also quite understandable from the above. Anyway, for the moment I'll stay put and wait for the configuration mechanism to stabilize. Once that has happened I'd be delighted to get to know the details about how it works ... then the Mac installer could also enter the stage finally. Oliver _______________________________________________ dev-context mailing list [email protected] http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/dev-context
