July 1st: Beginners TeX Hour: Why Software Sucks: Geeks Drive Stick Shift Cars

[Zdenek Wagner]

Hi,

the situation is even more complex, you even must have the same OS.
Many years ago happened to us, when I was asked to develop a macro
package for a journal and we had the same version of TeX Live, the
same version of DejaVu fonts, yet the article compiled from the same
sources by XeLaTeX in Linux was one page shorter than the same done on
Mac. For some reason font handling was different. Versioning of DejaVu
fonts is important and downgrading DejaVu might require downgrade of
fontspec whcih may lead to domino effect requiring downgrade of
everything.

Zdeněk Wagner
http://ttsm.icpf.cas.cz/team/wagner.shtml

čt 1. 7. 2021 v 4:00 odesílatel Norbert Preining <norbert at preining.info> napsal:
>
> Hi
>
> > The videos from last week's heavy technical TeX Hour on TeX Live (except
> > for a few to follow tomorrow) are at:
> > https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw1FZfIX1w7jEC4iuK5Q0HPccM1IE3ygD
>
> Watched it. A few comments:
> - first of all, move your meetings to reasonable time for me and I will
>   participate - but don't complain that TeX Live people are not
>   interested. I told you this already a few times.
>
> - Having only the tex macros gives you say 90%, but of what one normally
>   needs, but if you want actual reproducability you need to have the
>   fonts **and** the binaries also available from older versions,
>   otherwise there is no guarantee that the outputs are the same.
>   That defeats all the experiments how small it is for only tex files,
>   yes, they are not big, that we know.
>
> - As Nelson said, just hacking kpse to return a handle to a file from a
>   pack is not enough, because there are hundreds of other programs in a
>   variety of languages that do NOT use kpse and still open these files.
>   So one needs to - as Nelson said - rewrite the complete IO layer of
>   the OS running, **and** in addition doing that for all platforms we
>   support .... good luck.
>
> Enjoy your experiments.
>
> Norbert
>
> --
> PREINING Norbert                              https://www.preining.info
> Fujitsu Research  +  IFMGA Guide  +  TU Wien  +  TeX Live  + Debian Dev
> GPG: 0x860CDC13   fp: F7D8 A928 26E3 16A1 9FA0 ACF0 6CAC A448 860C DC13