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Formalise which versions of TeX Live/engines/Lua are supported

Open josephwright opened this issue 8 years ago • 11 comments
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Currently our normalisation, particularly for LuaTeX, has been built up over a period. We also have features such as epoch support that vary with year (see #7). Probably we should state in the documentation a formal policy and make sure the code is in line with it.

josephwright avatar Jun 26 '17 10:06 josephwright

I'm minded to say 'TeX Live 2016 versions onward': OK?

josephwright avatar Dec 10 '17 09:12 josephwright

Fine with me. It never occurs to me that people might run new code on old distributions...

wspr avatar Dec 10 '17 12:12 wspr

I just did by mistake on this machine ... it had some full set of latex files in my private |~/texmf| and as a result all my formats were 2015 even though it was a 2017 TL :-) gave me a strange error message this morning which made me realize that something is weird

FrankMittelbach avatar Dec 10 '17 12:12 FrankMittelbach

I'm minded to say 'TeX Live 2016 versions onward': OK? yes

FrankMittelbach avatar Dec 10 '17 12:12 FrankMittelbach

LuaTeX is likely to give failures between different releases: I'll probably note that in the docs.

josephwright avatar Dec 10 '17 13:12 josephwright

@josephwright Perhaps a compatibility matrix might help.

cereda avatar Dec 10 '17 13:12 cereda

@cereda keeping that maintained is more trouble than it is worth and a stale matrix helps nobody, so I don't think so in that case.

FrankMittelbach avatar Dec 10 '17 14:12 FrankMittelbach

@FrankMittelbach ack. 😉

cereda avatar Dec 10 '17 14:12 cereda

Note that the biggest single issue is that LuaTeX normalisation depends on the release. So you have to update .tlg files every TeX Live release. That doesn't mean that l3build fails with TeX Live 2016: it's only the 'un-normlisable' bits that have altered.

josephwright avatar Dec 10 '17 14:12 josephwright

I think with the move to a stand-alone script it will make sense to say that we only support the latest releases once TL'18 is out (and so the script is generally available). What I'll do is document that and get it to CTAN shortly.

josephwright avatar Mar 16 '18 09:03 josephwright

I think we are now in a position where it's 'any recent release' - I'd expect TL'20 and TL'21 to work at least.

josephwright avatar Nov 24 '21 22:11 josephwright