[tex-live] TeXlive for Debian/Sarge and upward - version 2005.08.24-1 online

Frank Küster frank at kuesterei.ch
Thu Aug 25 21:51:49 CEST 2005


karl at freefriends.org (Karl Berry) wrote:

>     some ancient texinfo version tested whether \pdfoutput is defined
>     and set it to 1
>
> Ah.  I didn't realize that was the problem.  Not necessarily that
> ancient -- that whole \pdfoutput thing became an issue last year.
> So if Octave, Make, or anyone else gets their texinfo.tex updated,
> hopefully the problem will go away.

Well, even Debian sarge (istn't that an ancient distribution already?)
has texinfo 4.7 which does it right (at least "right enough", AFAIR it
sets \pdfoutput to relax with original TeX).

> However, I'm a bit confused about why it was a problem in the first
> place.  In TeX Live, we adopted an approach that kept compatibility, by
> reading a file pdftex-dvi.tex when the non-pdf formats are built, which
> undefines \pdfoutput and the like, precisely because of problems like
> this.
>
> Thomas, did you end up deciding to break compatibility in teTeX?  I
> thought you had gone along with that, but maybe not.  Yeah, I think I do
> remember that you didn't, after all.  So it goes.

How do you undefine a primitive?

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer



More information about the tex-live mailing list