[luatex] luatex beta 0.37.0

[Taco Hoekwater]

Hi,

I have just uploaded luatex 0.37.0.

This is a beta in the process towards 0.40.0, the version that
will be included in texlive 2009. This beta will be shortlived,
the plan is to release the next one in about a week.

This release is mainly intended to allow testing of two new things:

* The new build process, which is based on the one that will be
used for texlive 2009.

Lots of build-time stuff is overhauled, and that means that the binary
itself as well as the build process needs testing. Please try on
your system and let us know if something goes amiss.

* The new shell_escape = 'p' functionality invented by Karl and Akira.

Karl wrote about that:

> As I've mentioned to some of you, Akira and I have been implemented a
> restricted version of \write18: only commands which are explicitly
> listed in texmf.cnf can be executed.  Along with sufficient quoting, I
> think that this is secure enough that it can be enabled by default, and
> I plan to do this for TeX Live 2009.

The texmf.cnf variable for 'acceptable commands' is named
shell_escape_commands. In luatex, the variables shell_escape and
shell_escape_commands will be fetched from the texconfig table in case
of a disabled kpathsea (as context mkiv does).

The important thing to note is that if you are typesetting a document
with luatex (as opposed to executing a texlua script), these variables
now also effect the os.execute(), io.popen(), os.exec() and os.spawn()
functions. Unless a non-false value of shell_escape has been read from
either texmf.cnf or the texconfig table, these functions will not do
anything anymore.

Nothing has changed for the case where luatex is used as a script
interpreter.


==============================================================
Luatex beta-0.37.0 was released 20090331 (commit #2194)
==============================================================

* Luatex now implements shell_escape = 'p', a new feature
  in web2c that intends to make \write18 more secure.

* Attributes can now have negative values. The special value
  for 'unset' is lowered to -0x7FFFFFFF (it used to be -1).

* The lua 'kpse' library now has an object-oriented interface
  as companion to the procedural interface. This is useful for
  e.g. controlling the discovery of mplib files.

* The new internal integer parameter \outputbox allows setting
  of the output box number (default: 255, max: 65535)

* The new primitives \Udelimiterunder and \Udelimiterover
  complete the set of 'StretchStacks' for OpenType Math.

* Fixed a bug in font string conversions on the Macintosh that
  resulted in warnings about 'unaligned pointers being freed'.

* Khaled Hosny spotted a bunch of manual errors.

* There was bug in the width of math_accent objects when
  there were super- or subscripts attached to the accentee.

* In PDF mode, TRT \leaders were bugged.

* The source tree now uses the new texlive build system that
  Peter Breitenlohner created.

* There is now a single build.sh instead of four separate
  ones. It has a few options:
      --make      : only make, no make distclean; configure
      --parallel  : make -j 2 -l 3.0
      --nostrip   : do not strip binary
      --mingw     : crosscompile for mingw32 from i386-linux
      --ppc       : crosscompile for ppc osx on intel osx

  Note: --parallel still sometimes causes crashes due to
  timing errors, so use that option with care.

* Many compiler warnings have been removed (but not all yet).


The archives (now including source again) can be downloaded from
supelec as usual:

        http://foundry.supelec.fr/projects/luatex/

You could also check out the sources via anonymous svn:

  svn co svn://scm.foundry.supelec.fr/svn/luatex/tags/beta-0.37.0

Bugs and feature requests can be added to the issue tracker at

       http://tracker.luatex.org

Have fun,
Taco