[tex-live] Technical showstoppers for TL2003

[Vladimir Volovich]

"KB" == Karl Berry writes:

 KB> I could imagine programming a default of cp8bit.tcx easily
 KB> enough, but won't that cause incompatibilities in other ways?  I
 KB> mean, how about a simple plain TeX: \immediate\openout1 = foo.exa
 KB> \write1{L'ИtИ est fini.}

 KB> Does that write ^^ notation for you?  It does for me, in both TL7
 KB> and TL2003, and that is good, because that is what the TeXbook
 KB> says should happen.

indeed, that should happen by default. in TL7, however, if i'm
correct, the behavior was dependent on the current locale, and Fabrice
may have got another result if he run tex in a locale in which sone
8-bit characters are declared as printable. under the "C" locale,
TL7's TeX behaved as described in the TeXbook.

I hope that TeX in TL2003 is no more dependent on locale (which would
be nonsense from the document portability point of view), and by
default uses the ^^ notation to output 8-bit chars, allowing to change
this with the (non-standard) --translate-file option.

Best,
v.