drop support for WeBWorK/PG at versions 2.18, 2.17, 2.16?

[Alex Jordan]

PreTeXt currently supports WeBWorK/PG versions going back to 2.16. Version 2.19 was released on August 6, 2024. The current version of WeBWorK/PG is 2.20, and will be 2.21 this summer. 

When 2.19 was released, there were a lot of table-related improvements that PreTeXt could leverage to:

1. Reduce the size of table-related PG output by an order of magnitude.
2. Make sidebyside available inside a webwork (by way of a PG layout table).

Doing 1 and 2, personally I would have to cut off support for 2.18 and earlier. It's not that it would be impossible to maintain backwards compatibility, but personally I wouldn't want to put the time into that. There would be a lot of other junk in the code that could be dropped if we are no longer supporting 2.16–2.18.

Would it be reasonable for me to announce now that starting in summer 2026, PreTeXt would only support WeBWorK/PG that is 2.19 or later?

[Rob Beezer]

Dear Alex,

> Would it be reasonable for me to announce now that starting in summer 2026,
PreTeXt would only support WeBWorK/PG that is 2.19 or later?

As the one writing the code, it is your call. And I think a six-month-ish
warning is good. Which means my personal vote is yes.

Rob

On 12/27/25 23:52, Alex Jordan wrote:
> PreTeXt currently supports WeBWorK/PG versions going back to 2.16. Version 2.19
> was released on August 6, 2024. The current version of WeBWorK/PG is 2.20, and
> will be 2.21 this summer.
>
> When 2.19 was released, there were a lot of table-related improvements that
> PreTeXt could leverage to:
>

> 1. Reduce the size of table-related PG output by an order of magnitude.
> 2. Make sidebyside available inside a webwork (by way of a PG layout table).

>
> Doing 1 and 2, personally I would have to cut off support for 2.18 and earlier.
> It's not that it would be impossible to maintain backwards compatibility, but
> personally I wouldn't want to put the time into that. There would be a lot of
> other junk in the code that could be dropped if we are no longer supporting
> 2.16–2.18.
>
> Would it be reasonable for me to announce now that starting in summer 2026,
> PreTeXt would only support WeBWorK/PG that is 2.19 or later?
>
>
>
>

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[Oscar Levin]

Question: does this change mean that fewer problems in the OPL would be supported by PreTeXt?  Or is it just that the servers that are used to generate webwork would need to be 2.19 or later?

If it is the former, do we have any idea how many problems that are currently being used would be affected?

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[Alex Jordan]

> Question: does this change mean that fewer problems in the OPL would be supported by PreTeXt?

Not really. Although the question is more complicated than it seems, because the OPL is also versioned. But this is all about when an exercise is authored in PTX, and PTX converts it to build a .pg file. I'd like to start using tools that PG 2.19+ has, but for which an older version of PG would probably choke on.

• local static processing of PG files needs to be 2.19+ anyways, so no effect there
• remote processing of PG files (either for static or live rendering) by a webwork2 server is what matters here. To for sure work on PTX-generated PG files, it would need to be a 2.19+ server.

Note that the OPL might start to have exercises that use these newer tools too, and whatever the current OPL version is can have exercises that are not compatible with an old webwork2 server.

The AIM and Runestone webwork2 servers are kept up to date, so there shouldn't be a problem there.

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