[Tex/LaTex] 2013, year of the TeX bugs report. Will pdfTeX, XeTeX, etc. be changed accordingly

debuggingknuthtex-core

Barbara Beeton said (TUGboat vol. 34, pag. 4):

As noted on Don Knuth's TeX web pages,
www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/abcde.html,
he "intend[s] to check on purported bugs again
in the years 2013, 2020, 2028, 2037, etc."

So 2013 is the year for a debugging session.

My question

After DEK has debugged (i.e. changed) TeX,
will there be identical changes in pdfTeX, XeTeX, and the other
engines according to the changes in TeX?

Best Answer

My dark guesses, freely adapted from Sybill Trelawney's divination lessons:

2013

  • Since the latest changes (3.1415926) were put into the main TeX engines (TeX, pdfTeX, LuaTeX, XeTeX) I would expect the same for changes of this year, because these engines are more or less maintained.

2020

  • Changes are unlikely because of a very dark death.
  • Maintenance of XeTeX has ended.

2028

  • Religious wars about the state of TeX and its creator.
  • Maintenance of pdfTeX has ended.

2037

  • Hardware and software are in the hands of global companies and governments. Free software, compilers, programs are forbidden. Free texts are handwritten and masqueraded as artwork.

2047 etc.

  • What is TeX?
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