[luatex] Luatex primitive names

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 11:05:24AM +0100, Norbert Preining wrote:

> On Mi, 11 Mär 2009, Heiko Oberdiek wrote:
> > > we don't care about < 0.40 and macro package support before 0.40
> > 
> > LuaTeX 0.25 is part of TL 2008, thus it will be significantly present
> > some time, probably years, if not decades.
> 
> explicite statement that luatex is not stable, not even close to be
> stable in any way. How many users are playing around currently with
> luatex? Probably only context people and some others, but none of them
> is a "plain-normal-TeX-user".
> 
> No, I would not care for 0.25 backward compatibility.

A package might want to use features of LuaTeX, if it is available,
e.g. some problem can be solved in a better or more robust way
using Lua and it doesn't matter, how old LuaTeX is.
\luatexversion helps doing this without bothering the user
with details or even low level error messages. And \directlua
can then be used without dependency from the format that is used.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko <oberdiek at uni-freiburg.de>