Hi Thomas, You wrote, a good number of e-mails ago: > But would it be possible > to use ConTeXt without having to care about bugs in > updated code or broken links between different modules...?
Thought I'd add a brief note to the conversation about updates and stability. ConTeXt Mark II (can use XeTeX, pdfTeX, LuaTeX, and all those other engines) is extraordinarily stable. Its development is frozen (although I think bugfixes can still be requested). Because it is written in TeX, a language that is also frozen, I think it is quite likely that Mark II documents will still compile in 20 years. Mark II is included in the Standalone distribution; use the `texexec` command to compile a document with Mark II. ConTeXt Mark IV is Hans's rewriting of ConTeXt in TeX + Lua, adding lots of features along the way because Lua makes it so damn easy. It requires LuaTeX. * The beta version are mercurial; bugs are introduced and fixed all the time. If you want to use a beta for a project, this is the usual advice: make a separate Standalone installation for your project, and don't update that unless you want/have to. That said: this is only because the next update might contain a bug when you least need it, it's not about compatibility. Hans, as far as I know, tries very hard to not break backward compatibility. * A stable version comes out once a year. They receive special bug-checking attention, and because Hans dislikes breaking backward compatibility I think you could hop from stable to stable and your documents would still compile. As for your third worry, modules dependency hell: this is very much a LaTeX thing. 2 reasons: 1. Pretty much everything is already in ConTeXt itself, meaning less external modules are needed. 2. ConTeXt is 10 years younger than LaTeX, meaning that its design and architecture are 10 years more modern. Specifically, LaTeX has an entire taxonomy of packages that make package-writing easier -- key-value, loops, string operations -- and user-facing packages may depend on any number of these. ConTeXt doesn't have this problem: everyone just depends on the core. So if it's stability you worry about, you have three options: * Use Mark II, solid as a rock. * Follow the stable Mark IVs. * Take a bleeding-edge beta and don't update it. Good luck! --Sietse ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context webpage : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://tex.aanhet.net archive : http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/contextrev/ wiki : http://contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________
