[XeTeX] Overfull boxes return status of 0 in XeTeX

[Julian Bradfield]

On 2016-03-13, Philip Taylor <P.Taylor at Rhul.Ac.Uk> wrote:
> I respectfully disagree.  I am advocating the philosophically correct
> approach, requiring a small amount of work by a small number of people
> -- those responsible for eTeX, PdfTeX and XeTeX :  I assume that LuaTeX
> can already handle this, as opposed to an inelegant and inefficient
> work-around which may require a considerable amount of work by an
> unknown but potentially somewhat larger set of people -- those
> responsible for the various now-and-future front-ends to *TeX.

Do you have a full list of all possible now-and-future events that
you might want to flag this way? If not, you're requiring indefinite
attention from the various *TeX maintainers. What about LaTeX/Plain TeX/AMSTeX
warnings? They can be equally important, but I don't think the core
*TeX engine knows about them.

Just wrap *TeX in a script that greps the log file and accepts your
desired command line arguments. Then only *one* person, namely you,
has to do the work, and you can make the script available to any other
front-end authors and maintain it for them. It wouldn't take long.

In terms of programmer efficiency, that's much better than asking several
different people to hack on C (or whatever language *TeX is written
in) and maintain consistent lists of possible command-line switch
values every time you think of a new case you want to detect.
As observed by several of us, computer time efficiency is irrelevant
for such trivial tasks as grepping *TeX log files. (Even on a
decade-old computer, the time to grep a typical log file will be
measured in a very small number of milliseconds.)