[Fontinst] fontinst v1.924 usage

[LarsHellström]

Yesterday I got a message from Jim Hefferon <ftpmaint at alan.smcvt.edu> that
surprised me quite a bit. Apparently he's one of the CTAN maintainers, and
he wrote that:
>I've noticed that the most recent versions of
>fontinst, even the prerelease version, that we hold seem to be quite
>old.
>
>One resulting problem is that I am getting package submissions that
>rely on fontinst but that are not compatible with either version
>that we hold.  That's of course a problem for our users (yours and mine!).

Now, since the only fontinst newer than the one on CTAN is the v1.924 on
http://abel.math.umu.se/~lars/fontinst/ that I wrote about four weeks ago,
it stands to reason that these submissions he writes about is using that
version. This is fine, although then I don't understand why there hasn't
been any traffic on this list concerning these things -- I'd love to hear
about them! Not the least because it encourages me to do some more work on
fontinst.

So far the only response I've seen was Walter's work with Polish letters,
and that is interesting too, but all that was with v1.914.

Lars Hellström

PS: Is anyone making programmatic use of the INFO> lines emitted by the
\latinfamily command anymore? The reason I'm asking is that I'm thinking
about replacing latin.mtx by newlatin.mtx in this command, thus changing

\def\latin_encodings{
   \latin_encoding{7t}{9t}{9o}{OT1}{latin}
   \latin_encoding{8t}{9e}{9d}{T1} {latin}
   \encoding_switches
   \if_textcomp_
      \latin_encoding{8c}{9c}{9c}{TS1}{textcomp}
   \fi
}

to

\def\latin_encodings{
   \latin_encoding{7t}{9t}{9o}{OT1}{newlatin}
   \latin_encoding{8t}{9e}{9d}{T1} {newlatin}
   \encoding_switches
   \if_textcomp_
      \latin_encoding{8c}{9c}{9c}{TS1}{textcomp}
   \fi
}

and this could change some of these messages slightly. I suppose Walter
might be using them (having inherited the task of making psfonts/, which is
for what these messages were originally introduced, if I have understood it
correctly), but I would also suspect that he may anyway have overridden the
fontinst.sty definition of \latin_encodings in his production set-up and
thus wouldn't be affected.