[XeTeX] How to manually create the xelatex.fmt?

[Zdenek Wagner]

2011/10/19 Chris Travers <chris.travers at gmail.com>:
> On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 4:45 AM, Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de> wrote:
>
>> Well I'm a windows user so actually I'm not really affected. But
>> imho the linux distros should rethink their installation methods and
>> installation advices. It is absurd that 10 or more distros invest a
>> lot of main power in making packages when they lack the main power
>> to keep them up-to-date.
>
> Actually, for being a long-term support distro, Debian (using TexLive
> 2009) is about as up to date as you will find.
>
> Here's the reason for this.  You may not agree with it but for those
> of us who do server programming it makes a *tremendous* amount of
> sense on the server side.
>
> The basic thing is that servers generally require stability because an
> introduced bug can affect large numbers of users simultaneously.
> Consequently, the way Debian does this is by running unstable
> versions, that graduate to testing version, which graduate to stable
> versions, often over a period of a couple several years.  This gives
> early adopters an opportunity to shake out issues, and then by the
> time folks are deploying critical servers, the issues, limitations,
> etc. are well known, tested and documented, and they're not going to
> introduce new bugs by upgrading out from under the applications.  This
> is important in this environment.
>
> Long term support distros (Ubuntu LTS, RHEL, Debian) tend to backport
> fixes for critical bugs to earlier versions where required so the
> software is still supported.  This is one reason why which distro of
> TexLive is being used can be misleading.  One doesn't really know
> what's been backported or not.
>
> This matches my needs very well.  If my clients are running accounting
> systems, the last thing I want is an upgrade of TexLive to break their
> ability to generate invoices.  If there are bugs in older versions, I
> can work around those bugs, but the problem of getting a document that
> will only render with one version or another is not acceptable to my
> application.  Consequently I stick with older, solid packages, avoid
> cutting edge ones (exception currently being XeTeX for a subset of
> users, and that's only due to issues of i18n in the invoice templates,
> which generally causes pdflatex to croak).
>
I need stability and I cannot affoard if TL upgrade breaks my
documents. That's why I use as few packages as possible. I write my
own macros, my own packages. I will guarantee that eg zwpagelayout
will always be backward compatible (otherwise my documents will cease
to work) but due to conflicts with some packages I will soon released
and improved version that will need at least TL2008. XeTeX depends on
the platform fonts. Once I cooperated with a man working on Mac. The
document was written in XeLaTeX and used DejaVu fonts. Mac had a
different version of DejaVu fonts and the result was that the document
was one page shorter on Linux than on Mac. Thus you may have different
results on different Linux distros.

> So this is where I am coming from.  I am happy with workarounds.  Not
> happy with "you must upgrade every couple years."  Upgrades must,
> under no circumstances, break the accounting software, and if that
> means many bugs go unfixed, that's what that means.  Generally
> speaking that means that bugs get fixed only if the maintainers
> conclude that the fix is backwards compatible, and that the bugfix is
> sufficiently non-intrusive that the chance of introducing new problems
> is minimal.  I have already heard that this is anything but the policy
> of Texlive (which has other advantages, but not for the environments I
> work in).
>
TeX Live packages what is available on CTAN. Anyway, if you need a
stable version of a package no matter whether in is upgraded on TL or
not, you can install it in another directory (not known to TL) and you
accounting SW can set TEXINPUT so that TeX running from it will first
look there and then to the TL tree. That's what I do in my accounting
SW.

> As a Windows user, I suspect you are thinking of desktop needs.
> That's fine.  A lot of people use the Tex stuff as essentially desktop
> publishing.  But there are others of us who build fairly critical
> systems using this and we have greatly increased needs for stability.
> It's one thing if a magazine, a school paper, or a book won't render
> because of an upgrade.  It's a very different thing when a weekly
> batch of checks you promised your clients would be mailed out *that
> day* fails at 1pm in the afternoon because something changed in one of
> the Tex packages you use to generate the checks and now someone has to
> fix it in time to mail them out.  The way you guarantee that is by
> making sure it works and not touching the underlying dependencies
> unless you absolutely must.  The fact that they are outdated makes no
> difference.
>
The solution is to use as few packages as possible and make your own
copies of important packages if you are afraid that an upgrade may do
any harm.

> Best Wishes,
> Chris Travers
>
>
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-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz