[tex-live] Ftuture state of XeTeX in TeXLive

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 13:19, Vafa Khalighi wrote:
> Hi
> Since Jonathan has no time any more for coding XeTeX, then what will be the
> state of XeTeX in TeX distributions such as TeXLive? will be XeTeX removed
> from TeXLive just like Aleph and Omega (in favour of LuaTeX) were removed
> from TeXLive?

Omega was remove because it was buggy, unmaintained, but most
important of all: hardly usable. It took a genius to figure out how to
use it, while XeTeX is exactly the contrary. It simplifies everything
in comparison to pdfTeX. Omega was low quality and Aleph was
deprecated also because LuaTeX now contains all functionality that was
worth keeping.

There is no reason to remove XeTeX yet (unless it gets merged with
LuaTeX one day, but that won't happen yet), but it is true that a
maintainer is desperately needed. If nothing else, if nobody adapts
the code, it might stop working with next version of Mac OS X or a
version after that.

Mojca