Hi Hans,

On Sat, 2025-06-14 at 09:41 +0200, Hans Hagen wrote:
> On 6/14/2025 8:47 AM, Max Chernoff via ntg-context wrote:
> i wonder if a too frequent texlive sync is good, as it sounds pretty beta

My thinking was that if it's stable enough for the users of the
Standalone Distribution (many of whom use ConTeXt professionally), then
it should be stable enough for TeX Live. The build script tries
compiling a very basic test document

    
https://github.com/gucci-on-fleek/maxchernoff.ca/blob/master/builder/containers/tex/context-cache.tex

and aborts if it doesn't give the expected output, so the TL version
should never be *completely* broken. And it's pretty common for new
LaTeX releases to break lots of documents; people have posted tons of
duplicates of this question

    https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/735500

in this past week. Even the perpetually-stable pdfTeX had a few bugs
earlier this year.

> and isn't tex live also in linux distributions?

Yes, but almost all the distros base their packages off of the annual
ISOs, most of which are severely outdated (TL23 and older are common):

    https://repology.org/project/texlive/versions
    https://repology.org/project/texlive-base/versions

> maybe some delay is
> better; is there some policy wrt that in texlive?

Karl updates the packages in TL every day; most days there are 3--8
different packages that get updated. And it's pretty common for packages
to be updated multiple times in a week (often after a new major version
was released), and there are a few packages that are consistently
updated almost every week.

> like monthly update or so that we can then adapt to?

Sure, I can reduce the update frequency if you want; right now it's set
to check for updates daily, but it's easy to change it to every second
day/weekly/monthly/etc. My thinking was that since all software has
bugs, frequent updates in TL will shorten the interval between people
reporting bugs and them receiving the fix. Or I can let the autoupdater
run daily most of the time, but then disable it during the weeks of
BachoTeX and the ConTeXt Meeting (when updates tend to be more
frequent).

> (i wondered about a warning of using a different than default papersize
> as set up by texlve - i saw that it's optional in the installer -
> [...] but i'll think about it; manuals
> are rendered assuming A4)

I tried convincing Karl to let me remove the system-dependent paper
stuff (which I added in the first place at his request), but he wants to
keep it for consistency with the other formats.

> but that is a bit hard to catch realiable

If the file "context-papersize.tex" exists (full path:

    $TEXMFCONFIG/tex/context/user/context-papersize.tex

), then the user has ran "sudo tlmgr paper [letter|a4]"; otherwise, TeX
Live will use the default settings. So the only case that you should
need to check for is if "context-papersize.tex" contains the following
contents:

    \setuppapersize[letter][letter]

Thanks,
-- Max
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