[tex-live] Xdvi not working

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

Recall the problem. On 64 bit Macintoshes, xdvi in TeX Live 2016
works with XQuartz 2.7.8, but immediately crashes with XQuartz 2.7.9,
which was released on May 5, 2016.

The 64 bit version of xdvi in MacTeX was compiled on a machine
running Snow Leopard, with XQuartz 2.3.6.

—————

Tests:

The file xdvi is just a script which ultimately calls xdvi-xaw.

I recompiled TeX Live on El Capitan on a machine with
XQuartz 2.7.9. Then I moved the file xdvi-xaw from this
compile into the binary directory of TeX Live. After that
xdvi worked. (But the binary didn’t work on older machines,
as expected.)

Next I installed XQuartz 2.7.9 on my Snow Leopard machine
and recompiled TeX Live. Then I moved the file xdvi-xaw
from this compile into the binary directory of TeX Live on
that Snow Leopard machine running XQuartz 2.7.9.
After that, xdvi worked.

I have another machine running Snow Leopard. The
system was installed from scratch during the TeX Live testing
period, so it has X11 version 2.3.6. I moved the xdvi-xaw file
created above to the binary directory of TeX Live on the other
Snow Leopard machine. After that, xdvi continued to work.

Next I repeated this expeiment on an El Capitan machine
still running XQuartz 2.7.8. After that, xdvi continued to work.

So far, so good. If we upgrade XQuartz on the Snow Leopard
machine used to compile 64-bit binaries, then xdvi works on all
systems supporting 68 bits, and WITHOUT UPDATING XQUARTZ.
This is exactly what we need.

So there is one more test. I moved the xdvi-xaw file
created above to an El Capitan machine running XQuartz 2.7.9.
After that, xdvi failed in the standard way.

————

Conclusion: XQuartz and xdvi break the underlying assumption
behind TeX Live precompiled binaries: “we can compile binaries
on an older machine and get code which runs on any version of OS X"

 I’ll report these experiments to the XQuartz
people. 

If you want to use xdvi, don’t update to XQuartz 2.7.9.

Dick Koch