[tex-live] \pagecolor broken

[Johannes Hielscher]

Hi,

I am following TeXLive via SVN, and since today's update to revision
44623, I found the \pagecolor macro, intended to change the paper
colour in the output document, doing nothing in an (at least for me)
inexplicable pattern.

cat > mwe.tex << EOF
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\begin{document}
\pagecolor{red}
\LaTeX
\end{document}
EOF

Working as expected (red background):
xelatex mwe.tex
latex mwe.tex

NOT working (white background):
pdflatex mwe.tex
lualatex mwe.tex

xcolor.sty has not changed since 2016-05, and color.sty behaves the
same. So the reason apparently lies somewhere deeper.

Unfortunately, I cannot locate the date of this change narrower than to
say that in -r44569, \pagecolor has still worked as expected.
By today's -r44621 update to tlmgr-installed TeXLive, the same issue
has been brought to the officially distributed packages, too!

I didn't dive too deep into the code yet. I just wanted to report this
ASAP, as maybe someone has a clever idea about it (-:.

Best,
Johannes