Hi autumnus,
On Sat, 2026-08-01 at 07:55 +0000, autumnus wrote:
> I am a regular user of ConTeXt (standalone distribution from
> pragma-ade.nl) and I have a question regarding the update mechanism.
>
> I would like to update only the core components (e.g., the TeX engine,
> base macro packages, and essential binaries) while skipping updates
> to font files and documentation (the tex/texmf/fonts and
> tex/texmf/doc directories, for example).
>
> My motivation is twofold:
>
> I have made some custom font adjustments and I don’t want them to be
> overwritten by the update process.
>
> I would like to save bandwidth and time by not downloading large
> documentation files that I rarely consult.
An installation of the Standalone Distribution uses 510MB of disk space:
$ du -hsc /opt/context/tex/* | sort -rh
580M total
352M /opt/context/tex/texmf-context
117M /opt/context/tex/texmf
44M /opt/context/tex/texmf-linux-64
37M /opt/context/tex/texmf-modules
32M /opt/context/tex/texmf-cache
728K /opt/context/tex/texmf-context.tma
88K /opt/context/tex/texmf.tma
4.0K /opt/context/tex/texmf-linux-64.tma
0 /opt/context/tex/texmf-project
0 /opt/context/tex/texmf-local
0 /opt/context/tex/texmf-fonts
Whereas a minimal installation of the TeX Live version of ConTeXt only uses
130MB of disk space, since you can exclude the documentation and most
fonts entirely:
$ du -hsc /usr/local/texlive/2026/{texmf-dist/*,bin} | sort -rh
132M total
67M /usr/local/texlive/2026/texmf-dist/fonts
57M /usr/local/texlive/2026/texmf-dist/tex
4.6M /usr/local/texlive/2026/bin
2.4M /usr/local/texlive/2026/texmf-dist/scripts
1.3M /usr/local/texlive/2026/texmf-dist/metapost
236K /usr/local/texlive/2026/texmf-dist/web2c
84K /usr/local/texlive/2026/texmf-dist/ls-R
40K /usr/local/texlive/2026/texmf-dist/dvips
To do so, run the TL installer and disable fonts+source, install the
infra-only scheme, and then manually install ConTeXt afterwards with
"tlmgr install context". Another advantage of TL is that local mirrors
are available in most countries, so downloads can be faster in some
cases.
However, despite its larger size, the Standalone Distribution is much
more bandwidth-efficient, because it only downloads changed files,
whereas TL always downloads every single file from scratch whenever
there's an update.
Updates usually reach the TL version 1--3 days after the Standalone
Distribution, and the TL version is missing ~8 files compared to the
Standalone Distribution (out of 4.8k files total), but otherwise, the
two distributions should _mostly_ behave the same (unless I've screwed
something up, which happens occasionally).
Thanks,
-- Max
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