[tex-live] bringing xetex to texlive

[Jonathan Kew]

I'd like to work towards getting the XeTeX project (derivative of e- 
TeX with Unicode and OpenType support) integrated into TeX Live, so  
that it can be built and installed as a standard part of TL. An  
experimental version of XeTeX is now working on various Linux and  
other Unix-like systems, in addition to the original OS X platform,  
so I think it's time to make it part of the mainstream TeX distribution.

To do this, I'll need to update the XeTeX code (it's currently based  
on a year-old snapshot of sources from TL), and then it needs to be  
integrated into the main Web2C configuration and build process. Most  
of the code lives in its own xetexdir directory under texk/web2c, but  
there are of course a few changes to shared files in web2c/lib, etc.,  
so special care will be needed here to ensure that nothing else is  
affected. (E.g., there will be new #ifdef XETEX sections in files  
such as texmfmem.h and texmfmp.c.)

In addition to the xetex program itself, there will be a couple of  
output drivers to convert its "extended DVI" format to PDF: xdv2pdf  
(for OS X only, dependent on Mac OS X APIs), and xdvipdfmx, an  
extended version of dvipdfmx (for other platforms). The latter may  
eventually be merged back into the main dvipdfmx project, but for the  
time being it is an experimental extension.

Looking forward to hearing from you -- thanks!

Jonathan