[tex-live] TL'18: LuaTeX and Lua version

[David Carlisle]

On 19 January 2018 at 13:45, Norbert Preining <norbert at preining.info> wrote:
> Hi JOseph,
>
>> - There is a need to not simply make the change and use LuaTeX with
>>   Lua 5.3
>
> This is up to the maintainers of luatex. Please contact them and ask
> them to explain their decision.
>
>> - That being the case, if a mechanism to 'swap' what version
>>   "luatex"/"lualatex" point to could be arranged (symlinks/swapping
>>   .dlls/whatever)
>
> That is not easily possible, but what is possible is that we add formats
> for the luatex53.
>
> It would be much easier if the binaries are named luatex-devel or so
> (as far as I remember), because fmtutil already supports this kind of
> -dev binaries/formats (specifically done for luatex last or two years
> ago!).
>
> Best
>
> Norbert
>
 we wondered about that but in practice that makes it harder for any
real people to use as
editors and ide's etc need to then be set up to know about the new
formats, so we'll have a
year of telling people how to do that in help forums followed by a
year of telling
people why the button they set up this year fails next year when
(presumably) we go back to
just having one flavour of luatex again.

even if it wasn't integrated into tlmgr but just an add on script or
batch file or whatever, in my own setup
the easiest way of testing luatex53 seemed to be just to copy it in to
the existing (texlive 2017) bin area
as luatex and then let fmtutil(-sys) rebuild everything. I could of
course have set up texlua53 and lualatex53
as separate commands but then I'd have to configure test suites and
editors etc to use them.

David