[tex-k] portability of format dumps

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Sat Sep 19 00:28:00 CEST 2015


Hi Norbert,

In theory, as Akira said, .fmt/etc files from web2c are and have been
100% portable across platforms, independent of endian-ness, Windows
vs. Unix-ness, and everything else.  (I seem to recall that being one of
the first changes I made to web2c back in the mid/late-80s.)

There was a bug a few years ago, possibly present for more than one
year, where the format files were endian-dependent.  That was never
intentionally the case.  

(I wish we would reliably test this every year against the bug coming
back, but there are rarely enough minutes to get it done.)

Best,
Karl


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