[tex-live] Proposal for distribution snapshots

Hans Hagen pragma at wxs.nl
Sat Feb 7 15:40:41 CET 2004


At 14:19 07/02/2004, Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
>Given the recent issues with getting a working (and possible
>historical) copy of TeXware out of the repository, and given that only
>a core of developers has access to the revision control system, how
>about setting up a cron job that, say, at midnight UTC, created a
>daily snapshot of the entire source archive in .tar.gz or .tar.bz2
>form, with a timestamp in ISO 8601 format as part of its name, such as
>tex-live-2004-02-07.tar.bz2, with those snapshots accessible to anyone
>via normal FTP and HTTP?

One thing i've that occasionally pops up in my mind is that given the long 
history of tex cum suis, some good longitudinal archiving could be of 
benefit to future research. Some day -maybe 100 years from now- there will 
be a branch of history/computer science dealing with changes in 
design/paradigms/coding/documentation/whatever and then archives become 
important; i have no idea what is available now but i'm sure that ctan is 
not an archive in that sense. The only long term archives that we have are 
the ctan snapshots and tex lives, and we may hope that they will be copied 
to the latest media occasionally.

So, maybe we should start some cross-usergroup history project, a real 
archive in the historic sense ...

Hans  



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