[XeTeX] Status of babel and polyglossia in xelatex

[François Charette]

Ulrike Fischer wrote:
> Am Wed, 9 Dec 2009 18:29:25 +0800 schrieb Vladimir Lomov:
>
>   
>> I play with xelatex for some time but don't understand status of
>> polyglossia and babel in xelatex.
<...>

>> This is rather strange for me: if xelatex don't use babel why it has
>> babel banner?
>>     
>
> A part of the code of babel (some kernel commands needed to load
> language patterns) are in hyphen.cfg and included in the format.
> That's not a problem, polyglossia knows it, it needs such code too
> and simply reuse the one from babel. (At first polyglossia had its
> own hyphen.cfg, which meant that you had to regenerate the formats
> if you wanted to switch between babel and polyglossia. Happily this
> is no longer needed.)
>
>   

Well, its true that the very first release did (mistakenly) provide
hyphen.cfg (which I soon thereafter renamed hyphen_cfg before removing
it altogether), but it was never actually needed. Polyglossia has always
used the macros defined in hyphen.cfg from Babel that are compiled in
the xelatex format.

FC