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

Ulrike Fischer news3 at nililand.de
Thu Oct 20 17:13:08 CEST 2011


Am Thu, 20 Oct 2011 07:54:52 -0700 schrieb Chris Travers:

>> It can't. It does not carry shared libraries, DLLs, or such, that
>> make ld_config or such go mad. TeX Live is like the universe:
>> it's self-contained. And expanding...

> One of the other commentors talks about documents that don't render on
> all versions of TexLive.  If a client of mine is depending on this
> working, upgrading the various stuff from CTAN in order to get a
> security fix in an underlying program is a non-starter because it may
> break things, just as it breaks other documents.

This scenario is very rare. I actually can remember only two cases
when "engine" changes affected fatally documents: 

1. When the TeXSystems changed from tex to pdftex as underlying
engine some documents with faulty \ifpdf-test broke.

2. When for security settings writing access to parent/absolute
pathes were restricted some document broke too. 

In both cases only badly written documents had problems. 

Beside this: If there is a security hole and if fixing it affects
documents it doesn't matter who makes the fix: you get the problem
anyway - the only way to avoid it is not to fix the security issue.
Do you really suggest that users continue to work with a system
which has a known security hole only to avoid trouble with some
documents?  

-- 
Ulrike Fischer 



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