[tex-live] tl15/tl16 changes to come

[Karl Berry]

Alexander: the list of changes between versions is one of the most
time-consuming and fragile tasks I undertake each year.  I can't give
you an off-the-cuff answer beyond Norbert's reply and my reply below.  I
will be writing up the information for the pretest.html web page in
upcoming days, as I always do.

    * binaries: reproducible build support features

As far as I know the SOURCE_DATE_EPOCH envvar support, and the new
primitives for controlling dates and such, are only in pdftex.  And only
relevant for direct PDF output (not DVI).  Am I wrong?


Anyway, the biggest change in the binaries is certainly in luatex, which
has renamed or removed a great many primitives.  As far as I've been
able to discern, nearly every existing package and/or document using
luatex will need changes.

Hans graciously wrote an article for TUGboat summarizing the changes.  I
had hoped the TUGboat issue containing it would already be at the
printer by now, but due to circumstances beyond my control, that has not
happened and there is no ETA for the first TUGboat issue at this point.
Since I know this will be a critical issue to some people, I attach the
preprint (page numbers are bogus) for it, so those who are interested
can garner some information.

BTW, the LaTeX developers are well aware of this and have made yeoman
efforts to adapt LaTeX to the new regime.  Plain LuaTeX will reflect the
new changes, by design.  There will be new .ini and .cfg files galore.
All this will and must happen only for the pretest.

Good luck to us all,
Karl

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