[XeTeX] new version of HarfBuzz

[Jonathan Kew]

On 24/04/2017 15:36, Bobby de Vos wrote:
> On 2017-04-22 01:36, Jonathan Kew wrote:
>
>> So pulling a harfbuzz update into texlive/xetex and rebuilding would
>> indeed be beneficial.
>
> Am I correct that I could avoid rebuilding xetex on my Ubuntu Linux
> system? The binary /usr/bin/xetex is dynamically linked, and I have
> HarfBuzz and Graphite2 compiled from source and installed in /usr/local.
> The ldd command (ldd /usr/bin/xetex) reports those two libraries are
> loaded from /usr/local, and xetex -version reports
>
> Compiled with Graphite2 version 1.3.6; using 1.3.9
> Compiled with HarfBuzz version 1.0.1; using 1.4.5

OK, it sounds like if you update your locally-installed harfbuzz to 
1.4.6, that version of xetex should immediately benefit from the fix.

>
> The xetex binary as installed by the Tex Live installer in /usr/local
> does not seem to load those two libraries.

Right; the TL-distributed binaries avoid dynamic linking as far as 
possible, in order to maximize portability and consistency. The other 
side of this, of course, is that they don't automatically benefit from 
library updates.

> Which means that in order to
> have a xetex in /usr/bin (as packaged by Debian/Ubuntu) that has the
> update that JK did in the first part of 2016 to enable cross-space
> contextual rendering (needed for the Awami Nastaliq font) you would need
> Ubuntu 16.10 (yakkety) or later in order to have TeX Live 2016. Or maybe
> you can update /usr/bin/xetex with the PPA at
> ppa:jonathonf/texlive-2016, but I have not tested this to see if it
> would dynamically load the needed libraries.
>
> Bobby
>