upcoming changes to WeBWorK and PreTeXt

[Alex Jordan]

This is a heads up alert about upcoming changes with WeBWorK and PreTeXt.

A pull request to pretext will soon be merged. It will give PreTeXt
proper support for using a WeBWorK 2.19 server. (For reference, the
Runestone Academy WeBWorK support server is at version 2.18, and the
AIM WeBWorK server is at version 2.17.) Doing this required rewiring
of a few things, and while we do not expect anything will change for
those of you using an older WeBWorK server (given a lot of testing we
have done), it's always possible.

Once the PR is merged, a little later it will be picked up by the CLI.
This is when most PTX projects using WeBWorK should start to be on the
lookout for unforeseen issues as they rebuild with the CLI. I will
post a reply to this thread at that time.

A little while after that, I will upgrade the AIM WeBWorK server to
version 2.19. This will definitely affect projects that rely on that
server. They will all need to be rebuilt. So there will be appropriate
alerts when that is about to happen too, so that authors can rebuild.

Over at Runestone Academy, we will wait until summer to upgrade the
WeBWorK support server. There's never a best time, but roughly mid
June is the plan. This will minimize disruption for those books being
hosted at Runestone Academy.

There is a catch. It is possible for a book to be hosted at Runestone
Academy, but be using some other WeBWorK server. It may even be using
the AIM WeBWorK server. So now is a good time to check in on your
project and identify which WeBWorK server it uses. You could switch to
the Runestone WeBWorK server now if you want stability, or stay with
the AIM server and get access to the 2.19 features sooner.