[XeTeX] How to manually create the xelatex.fmt?

[Chris Travers]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 4:45 AM, Ulrike Fischer <news3 at nililand.de> wrote:

> Well I'm a windows user so actually I'm not really affected. But
> imho the linux distros should rethink their installation methods and
> installation advices. It is absurd that 10 or more distros invest a
> lot of main power in making packages when they lack the main power
> to keep them up-to-date.

Actually, for being a long-term support distro, Debian (using TexLive
2009) is about as up to date as you will find.

Here's the reason for this.  You may not agree with it but for those
of us who do server programming it makes a *tremendous* amount of
sense on the server side.

The basic thing is that servers generally require stability because an
introduced bug can affect large numbers of users simultaneously.
Consequently, the way Debian does this is by running unstable
versions, that graduate to testing version, which graduate to stable
versions, often over a period of a couple several years.  This gives
early adopters an opportunity to shake out issues, and then by the
time folks are deploying critical servers, the issues, limitations,
etc. are well known, tested and documented, and they're not going to
introduce new bugs by upgrading out from under the applications.  This
is important in this environment.

Long term support distros (Ubuntu LTS, RHEL, Debian) tend to backport
fixes for critical bugs to earlier versions where required so the
software is still supported.  This is one reason why which distro of
TexLive is being used can be misleading.  One doesn't really know
what's been backported or not.

This matches my needs very well.  If my clients are running accounting
systems, the last thing I want is an upgrade of TexLive to break their
ability to generate invoices.  If there are bugs in older versions, I
can work around those bugs, but the problem of getting a document that
will only render with one version or another is not acceptable to my
application.  Consequently I stick with older, solid packages, avoid
cutting edge ones (exception currently being XeTeX for a subset of
users, and that's only due to issues of i18n in the invoice templates,
which generally causes pdflatex to croak).

So this is where I am coming from.  I am happy with workarounds.  Not
happy with "you must upgrade every couple years."  Upgrades must,
under no circumstances, break the accounting software, and if that
means many bugs go unfixed, that's what that means.  Generally
speaking that means that bugs get fixed only if the maintainers
conclude that the fix is backwards compatible, and that the bugfix is
sufficiently non-intrusive that the chance of introducing new problems
is minimal.  I have already heard that this is anything but the policy
of Texlive (which has other advantages, but not for the environments I
work in).

As a Windows user, I suspect you are thinking of desktop needs.
That's fine.  A lot of people use the Tex stuff as essentially desktop
publishing.  But there are others of us who build fairly critical
systems using this and we have greatly increased needs for stability.
It's one thing if a magazine, a school paper, or a book won't render
because of an upgrade.  It's a very different thing when a weekly
batch of checks you promised your clients would be mailed out *that
day* fails at 1pm in the afternoon because something changed in one of
the Tex packages you use to generate the checks and now someone has to
fix it in time to mail them out.  The way you guarantee that is by
making sure it works and not touching the underlying dependencies
unless you absolutely must.  The fact that they are outdated makes no
difference.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers