[tex-live] About \newXeTeXintercharclass and latexrelease package

[David Carlisle]

On 9 May 2015 at 11:44, Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de> wrote:
> Am Sat, 9 May 2015 11:10:34 +0100 schrieb David Carlisle:
>
>> actually I think that probably is a good workaround.
>> probably if   \RequirePackage[2014/01/01]{latexrelease} is specified
>> I should have undefined \newXeTeXintercharclass as well but that would just
>> have slightly changed the error message you got.
>
> I tried out \newXeTeXintercharclass\foo in plain and latex with
> TL2014, 2013 and 2012 and it never gave an error. So it was defined
> by default (probably in xelatex.ini, but I didn't check) already for
> quite a long time and so imho shouldn't be undefined (or fail)
> suddenly only because the newest LaTeX-format isn't used.
>
>

If you use an old format or the default usage of the new format then
it's defined.
It's only undefined if you use the new format and then use
latexrelease to make it
emulate an old one.

I think the two justifiable positions for the emulation would be:

to make it undefined (the part you quoted)
(because it wasn't defined in the old core latex release)

or to define it (the part I said we should probably do)
(because it was defined in the old ini file)

Actually what happens now is that all the inner workings are
undefined, but the top level
macro is left defined so you get an undefined command error on an internal macro
which is not so nice... (sorry:-)

David