File descriptor error for pdflatex.fmt creation on android 11

[Karl Berry]

Hi Henrik,

    Subject: Re: File descriptor error for pdflatex.fmt creation on android 11

>From your descriptions, all I can guess is that this is some kind of
(strange) Android problem being caused by this concept of "sanitizing
file descriptors", whatever that actually means technically.

I know of no reason why a macro vs. a function would make a difference
except for bugginess. All this code has been around for decades (modulo
the fmt compression, which is only a couple years old), without
problems, so I'm not at all inclined to mess with it to try to work
around self-inflicted Android issues.

Format files are compressed now since there is so much more data in
them, due to Unicode, so compression makes everything faster. Of course
you could disable that for your Android binaries if you wish.

Sorry I don't have anything more useful to suggest. --best, karl.