[tex-live] more testing

Olaf Weber olaf at infovore.xs4all.nl
Thu Jun 10 11:00:46 CEST 2004


Hans Hagen writes:

> Hi,
> since 8 bit is not on (yet) by default, i'm playing with the -8bit flag;
> the problem is that i cannot add it to configuration files without
> breaking existing setups (old binaries quit on an unknown flag); so, i
> wonder if it is possible (for the sake of future extensions, as well as
> for the sake of disappearing flags (oem and such) to let the binaries
> ignore unknown flags (a warning at most); now we have the problem that
> newer trees (e.g containing a newer texexec or other tex calling
> program) will no longer work with an old set of binaries.

Just providing a warning is easy, though options with arguments are
problematic if the -option=argument syntax isn't used, because the
program doesn't 'skip' the argument in that case.

> (also, is there a well defined return code scheme, so that one can see
> why a program quits? like, 1 = error, 2 = missing format/mem/base, 3 =
> mismatching kpse, etc)

No.

> btw:

> - how do older engines react on $engine?

They don't set it, shouldn't see it.

> - and is $engine defined in the tds standard ... (in the past some
>   pdftex was used next to pdfetex as well as for both engines, e.g for map
>   files)

It is specific to web2c, so not defined/covered by the TDS.

> - don't we need some kind of 'registration' system for that: tex etex
>   pdftex pdfetex pdfetex-pl (what is the convention for such language
>   things?) omega aleph xetex pdfxtex (the 'known' ones)

The engine name is hard-coded in the binary.  The current list of
known engines lives in texmfmp.h.  I'm not sure exactly how the *-pl
variants differ from the standard ones, so I cannot say at present
whether things need to be done differently.

-- 
Olaf Weber

               (This space left blank for technical reasons.)



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