cwebbin vs cweb 4.11

[user706]

Hi,

What exactly is the difference between
a) https://github.com/ascherer/cweb and
b) https://github.com/ascherer/cwebbin ?

Is a) cweb the same as b) cwebbin with all patches applied? No wait... it seems like a) cweb is the base to which b) cwebbin applied patches and changes.

Speaking of patches...
why does cwebbin have such an ultrastrange way of handling things?
I'm speaking of the "source drops" and patches.

In today's day and age with git; there seems to be no real reason to have source drops and weird manual steps such as
"extract ctwill.tar.gz and add the contents of cweb-4.11.tar.gz" (link) . etc.

So recommendation:
Why not have a new single repository with a branch cweb-4.11 and a branch cwebbin-4.11 (with all patches aready fully applied and results committed)! ?

Then to figure out the differences I can simply do:

git difftool --dir-diff cweb-4.11 cwebbin-4.11

Thanks.

[ascherer]

What exactly is the difference between a) https://github.com/ascherer/cweb and b) https://github.com/ascherer/cwebbin ?

You figured that one out yourself. I did, in fact, transfer quite a lot of stuff from CWEBbin to CWEB when I started to maintain the upstream code of CWEB 4. However, the CWEBbin extensions—including, but not limited to, the integration into TeX Live—do not fit well in CWEB proper, as the whole process heavily relies on cwebbin.spec.

Speaking of patches... why does cwebbin have such an ultrastrange way of handling things? I'm speaking of the "source drops" and patches.

Because. I started to work on CWEB—porting it to the Commodore Amiga in early 1993—more than thirty years ago, a long time before Git became a thing. (I used RCS, Subversion, and Perforce at one time or another, before committing [sic!] to Git.)

"extract ctwill.tar.gz and add the contents of cweb-4.11.tar.gz"

Yep, CTWILL is a serious problem in and of itself. The form in which it is presented in CWEBbin/TeX Live is a really long way from the “original” tarball somewhere on the Stanford servers (see the archived https://github.com/ascherer/ctwill project and its various branches for details).

So recommendation: Why not have a new single repository with a branch cweb-4.11 and a branch cwebbin-4.11 (with all patches aready fully applied and results committed)! ?

Feel free to do so! In fact, after the recent releases of CWEB 4.11, CWEBbin 2023.3, and pwebmac 4.11, I am considering to hand over the future development of, say, CWEB 5 to someone else. At this time, I am waiting for the release of TeX Live 2024 in order to publish updated versions of the knuth-pdf and knuth-hint packages on CTAN. After that I might call it quits.

[ascherer]

all patches aready fully applied and results committed

See CWEB in TeX Live and all *-w2c.* files for the final final results.

[ascherer]

Speaking of patches... why does cwebbin have such an ultrastrange way of handling things? I'm speaking of the "source drops" and patches.

In general, I let debbuild/rpmbuild do the job of unpacking the source drops and applying the patches.