[tex-live] fmtutil-sys not playing nice. (OpenBSD-sparc64)

[David Kastrup]

"Martin Schröder" <martin at oneiros.de> writes:

> 2007/5/7, Edd Barrett <vext01 at gmail.com>:
>> Just so I understand this,
>>
>> xetex is a unicode supported version of latex with some extra font bits also?
>
> s/latex/tex/
>
> And it does OpenType. And it needs some big libraries (freetype,
> fontconfig, ...), which makes porting of it difficult.

Probably the largest one would be ICU <URL:http://icu-project.org>.
As far as I have understood, XeTeX uses quite a few libraries to load
off tasks.  Those are large enough that one would not want to link
them statically, but of course using dynamic libraries takes away
consistent versioning: if the libraries change, so will the results.

It is a two-edged sword, but it certainly has enabled a single-person
project to come to a useful state rather fast.

And maintaining all that functionality on one's own could constitute
a) a resource hog for programmer work
b) a quality problem

But using the library could make for
a) in the case of upstream abandoning the library, a more severe
   maintenance problem.
b) licensing issues

In LuaTeX, a similar situation exists for the Lua interpreter.  Some
of the problems are catered by the LuaTeX team linking their own
version of the Lua interpreter (part of the SVN repository) statically
into the binary.

Lua is small enough to make separate maintenance and static linking
feasible.

For some of the libraries used in XeTeX, this might not be similarly
the case.

Conclusion, if any, left to the reader.

-- 
David Kastrup