Best practice for packages without concrete versioning

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1

Hello,

I’ve been looking for an existing package of ConTeXt, but haven’t come across one. I intend to submit a pull request for the package, but the distribution/versioning scheme for the tool is a little unusual so I’m not sure how to proceed.

There is a page where binary files can be downloaded, but the links are just the latest version, and there are no version-specific archived links. There is a seemingly unofficial bitbucket mirror which seems to have been created by someone with the same problem.

I’m assuming that the official site would be the preferred package source, but I am not sure how to tackle the packaging when the distribution changes so frequently without any versioning. I could reference the Bitbucket repository, but that doesn’t feel quite right because it seems to be unofficial and could be manipulated.

Any advice would be appreciated.

2

I took a look at the way it was being packaged over on the arch user repository and they seem to have had the same issue.

Note that the downloads are currently not versioned properly, so I will have to manually update the version and checksums when there is a new version, in the meantime you will have to skip checksum verification.

3

Here’s another mirror, this time on GitHub. This one looks a bit more official since it uses the contextgarden branding, but I don’t think it official. There is only 1 member in the organization, and I can’t find any reference to their place of employment, or their name on any of the official sites.

4

IIRC context is packaged as a child of the texlive package set.

5

I’d use archive.org URLs, like https://web.archive.org/web/20220124112642if_/http://lmtx.pragma-ade.nl/install-lmtx/context-linux-64.zip

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7

I think you’re correct, but there are some problems with that approach. I’m not sure how much of this holds true now, but I would also like to be able to install ConTeXt without the additional bloat of TeX Live.

From the link above:

ConTeXt is also included in TeXlive. The ConTeXt suite is updated continuously, whereas ConTeXt in TeXlive is updated less often. In particular, luatex and metapost are under active development and their binaries are updated frequently. ConTeXt follows these developments, indeed often drives development. As the binaries included in the TeXlive distribution are only updated yearly, ConTeXt on TeXlive will necessarily be less current than the ConTeXt suite. The ConTeXt suite is self-contained and can happily coexist alongside another installed TeX distribution.

This information is for ConTeXt IV too, so I’m not sure that TeX Live contains a distribution of LMTX (the latest ConTeXt version) since the binaries are updated yearly.

This is an interesting idea, and seems like the best approach given the available resources. Thanks, I’ll look into doing this.

8

I searched the existing packages, and there are several other instances where this is happening, so that seems to be the way to go.