[tex-live] LuajitTeX / TeXLive 2014

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Fri, Mar 28, 2014 at 9:20 PM, Élie Roux wrote:
>
>>> If so, will it be considered
>>> as an engine, with the corresponding commands and formats
>>> (dviluajitlatex, etc.)?
>>
>> Not sure, but even if it would be, I would vote against introducing
>> exponential combinatorial explosion of the symlinks – and those
>> starting with dvi in particular.
>
> I agree with you...
>
> Another solution I thought about was to have something similar to
> update-alternatives on debian, to switch between the luatex and luajitex
> binaries (though I'm not sure it wouldn't need to have formats rebuilt).
> Do you think it would be a good solution?

I was thinking along those lines as well (a brute force approach would
be a command or setting that changes symlinks of lualatex from luatex
to luajittex – not that this is a reasonable solution, it was just an
example). But I don't know enough about the underlying architecture to
be able to suggest anything or to be able to argue for any particular
approach. Writing hundreds of lines of code just for the sake of
allowing a switch would be an even bigger overkill and wouldn't make
any sense either.

Rebuilding the format would be the easy part. I don't know how to
handle the rest. (And I also wouldn't consider it a problem if there
was just the plain binary there, for people to come up with reasonable
solutions/ideas until 2015 ;)

Mojca