[email protected] skrev:
Hi Lars,

I don't have a complete collection myself, but I can point you
to my collection on the TeX Historic archives:

ftp://ftp.tug.org/historic/fonts/utilities/fontinst/
ftp://ftp.tug.org/historic/fonts/psfonts/tools/

Ah, this looks very good -- even some items before 1.335! I had a bit of trouble downloading the files, but think I've got it all now.

Some of this material was reconstructed from old CTAN CDs and some came from my personal collection.

Certainly saves me the trouble of digging through boxes on the garage attic in the hope of finding such an old CD myself.

What I can recall about the version history is the following:

v1.335 was the last official version on CTAN from Alan Jeffrey
in fonts/utilities/fontinst. It dates back to 1994, but stayed on CTAN until it was replaced by 1.80x or 1.90x.

1.80x, I think.

v1.500 and v1.504 came to CTAN as part of fonts/psfonts/tools
and were maintained by Sebastian Rathz.  They back to 1995
and were subsequently updated in 1996-1997 (v1.6.0, v.1.6.1).

v1.7 and v1.8 were short-lived fixes to Sebastian's distribution
which came from me in 1998, before I started to rewrite fontinst in ltxdoc. I'm not sure if they ever were submitted to CTAN.

It seems strange that there should have been an 1.8 which was different from 1.800, given that version numbers are compared as <factor>s.

v1.800 and v.1801 were the first versions in fonts/utilities/fontinst
that replaced Alan's version in 1.335.  These versions merged
several changes from Alan's v1.511 and Sebastian's 1.6 and 1.7.

Indeed, 1.511 rather than 1.512.

v1.90x were the first versions, when you took over from me
in 1999. AFAIK, the first versions were kept on CTAN in fonts/uitilities/fontinst-beta, before they replaced v1.801.

An attempt of mine to use CTAN as home for delevelopment. Didn't work very well.

In my archive, some the earlier verisions were distributed
as SHAR files by mail on the fontinst mailing list.

Eh? The .mime.gz files appear to be mails I sent, that have the source files as MIME attachments. I certainly wouldn't have been able to create SHAR archives back then... Also they don't seem to be addressed to the list, but rather to you and Sebastian.

I think some bugfixes were distributed via the mailing list, but not fontinst as a whole.

It is quite possible that some early versions didn't even arrive on CTAN, before reaching v1.910 or some such.

So much for my take on history.

Regards, Ulrik


P.S: If you want to upload additional versions to the archive,
please contact me, so we can arrange for copying the files.

A historical repository would certainly have a place in that location.



Karl Berry wrote:
Personally, I wouldn't worry too much about achieving a perfect vc
history.  Having a sequence of release tarballs available (e.g., in
ftp://ftp.tug.org/historic as Ulrik wrote about) seems like all the
history that anyone could stand, anyway.

The thing is, that history gets a lot more accessible when put in a repository than when just a collection of tarballs. fontinst.sty has a pretty good history record in the \changes, but the various ETX and MTX files are another matter.

Also, FWIW, I agree with Werner's suggestion to use savannah (or gna --
anything but sourceforge, which is soooo slow and painful and full of
advertising).

The catch there would be that savannah only supports CVS (AFAICT from the docs; they're not at all clear on the matter) and gna only CVS, SVN, and gnuarch. I really prefer to use git for version control, over the above because it's distributed and supports SSH.


Lars Hellström

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