Bug#344919: teTeX 3.x incompatible to older .sty files

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Tilman Höner zu Siederdissen <tilman.hzs@gmx.net> wrote:

> I assume there is a good reason why the usage of \pdfoutput was changed. Maybe 
> rather osajnl.sty should be changed than teTeX.

Yes, indeed style files that have such tests for \pdfoutput should be
changed.  They were wrong from the beginning, and in this simple form
the test works only once - as soon as you load two style files that try
this test, the second one would have assumed PDF even with teTeX 2.0.2.

> I still think this is an 
> important issue since it might concern a lot more commonly used style files 
> and users usually do not edit tex style files. 

You are right, it's an important issue.  But it's really the authors of
such buggy style files who should fix their things.  This has been
discussed at length by upstream, and the conclusion was that there are
only two possibilities: Either we break compatibility here and make
\pdfoutput a useful variable, or pdfTeX would have to drop respecting
that primitive (breaking all non-buggy packages) and invent a new one,
like \pdfoutputdontabuse.  And hope people would be more clever than
before.

You can imagine which decision was made...

Regards, Frank

-- 
Frank Küster
Inst. f. Biochemie der Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer