[luatex] Luatex primitive names

[Hans Hagen]

Manuel Pégourié-Gonnard wrote:
> Martin Schröder a écrit :
>> 2009/3/11, Heiko Oberdiek <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>:
>>> LuaTeX 0.25 is part of TL 2008, thus it will be significantly present
>>>  some time, probably years, if not decades.
>> Hopefully not.
> 
> It will. Some services widely-used by mathematicians, such as ArXiv, still use
> teTeX2, and some universities do so. People (esp. sysadmin) don't upgrade their
> TeX system as frequently as we TeXies could wish. This is a fact.

unless they have a full time staff to deal with bugs and such i'd advise 
them not to start using luatex before 2012 (when version 1.0 is 
expected) and even they they'd better wait stil the situation is stabelized

- it took a while before pdftex became widely used
- it took a while before latin modern was accepted

etc. also, archives should keep old tex's, old macros, old fonts, old 
patterns around forever

> Nobody wants to maintain an old version of LuaTeX. But a lot of macro writers
> want to be able do deal with them, and are asking the for a reliable way to do it.

hm, macro writers that want to deal with all versions of luatex pre 
(say) 0.5 must have plenty of spare time then

i myself follow the simple route ... if you want to use luatex (pre 1.0)

-- update binaries frequently
-- update the macro package at the same time
-- for that use regular updatable distributions

as tex live supports updating and as norbert posts packages for linux 
and as akira provides the latest greatest as well for windows i see no 
problem

we only feel comitted to stability once we have released 1.0 but you can 
bet that before that arrives much is already pretty stable

Hans

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