I have never used that but as far as I understand several other posts regarding this “offline” file it always draws the binding versions from that kar file during binding re-installation and not the latest/newest.
As long as you don’t have a slow data connection I would not use the kar file …
Nope, astro binding is part from ESH and therefore there is no jar file to download. But their is a hack for it which seems to work:
But do note that sometimes the further development of a binding requires also changes in the runtime (don’t know if that is the case with this hack) so you could encounter even more problems because of the “mismatch”.
Actually that was only the case from #1025 to #1033 where there was a critical bug which has been fixed now.
I’m using #1034 at the moment and it runs pretty smoothly. This was also the case before #1025. There have been several issues with the astro binding lately but at the moment it runs without any problems.