[luatex] Job name (was: Location of recorder file)

[Philipp Stephani]

Am 13.05.2011 um 12:57 schrieb Paul Isambert:

> I thought the basic ideas (as explained elsewhere) is you can't expect any prior macro, either in the kernel or in packages, to be fixed, so you have to live with that.

If there are bugs, they need to be fixed. While the kernel (latex.ltx) itself won't be modified, there is still lots of room for possible fixes: lualatex.ini, fixltx2e.sty, luatex.sty, dedicated packages...
Probably the syntax
\input abc
has to stay for compatibility reasons, but I think the syntax with quotation marks should go: It was never part of the original TeX, nobody can rely on its presence, and LuaTeX is still beta, so removing such features would do little harm. Doing the right thing is more important than strict compatibility to pdfTeX, IMO.
The only preferred syntax for the \input, \openin etc. primitives should then be
\input <general text>
For the \jobname issue, David's solution could be implemented: it seems to be the most robust one. I think I'll submit a patch.

> 
> Also, overloading the command line makes the code fails, but it also fails with other engines. I.e. "tex \edef\foo{\jobname} \input test" forces \jobname to "texput"; the only difference here is that "texput" will be used even if nothing refers to \jobname on the command line.

Yes but this difference it the important one: "tex \edef\foo{\jobname} \input test" has never worked, and nobody expects it to work in LuaTeX; on the other hand, "latex \input test" has always worked, and everybody expects it to work with LuaTeX, too. Since so many [1] are using this "feature", it will probably be a fruitless adventure to try to fix the whole universe – it might be better to officially document the choice of the job name, and demand that "latex \input test" work as expected for all engines. This seems even more important to me than the space character support.

[1] http://www.google.com/codesearch?as_q=%5Cb%28pdf%29%3Flatex%5Cs.*%5C%5Cinput&as_case=yes