20190410:
Kpathsea: More consistent brace expansion and path splitting; new variable TEXMFDOTDIR instead of hard-coded . in paths allows for easily searching additional or sub-directories (see comments in texmf.cnf).
epTEX, eupTEX: New primitives \readpapersizespecial and \expanded.
LuaTEX: Lua 5.3 now used, with concomitant arithmetic and interface changes. The homegrown library pplib is used to read pdf files, thus eliminating the dependency on poppler (and the need for C++); Lua interface changed accordingly.
MetaPost: r-mpost command name recognized as an alias for invocation with the –restricted option, and added to the list of restricted commands available by default. Minimum precision now 2 for decimal and binary mode. Binary mode no longer available in MPlib but still available in standalone MetaPost.
pdfTEX: New primitive \expanded; if new primitive parameter \pdfomitcharset is set to 1, the /CharSet string omitted from the PDF output, since it cannot feasibly be guaranteed correct, as required by PDF/A-2 and PDF/A-3.
XeTEX: New primitives \expanded, \creationdate, \elapsedtime, \filedump, \filemoddate, \filesize, \resettimer, \normaldeviate, \uniformdeviate, \randomseed; extend \Ucharcat to produce active characters.
tlmgr: Support curl as a download program; use lz4 and gzip before xz for local backups, if available; prefer system-provided binaries over binaries provided with TEX Live for compressor and download programs, unless the environment variable TEXLIVE_PREFER_OWN is set.
install-tl: New option -gui (with no argument) is the default on Windows and Macs, and invokes a new Tcl/TK GUI (see sections 1.3 and 3.1.6).
Utilities:
cwebbin (https://ctan.org/pkg/cwebbin) is now the CWEB implementation in TEX Live, with support for more language dialects, and including the ctwill program to make mini-indexes.
chkdvifont: report font information from DVI files, also from tfm/ofm, vf, gf, pk.
dvispc: make a DVI file page-independent with respect to specials.
MacTEX: x86_64-darwin now supports 10.12 and higher (Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave); x86_64-darwinlegacy still supports 10.6 and newer. The spell checker Excalibur is no longer included, since it requires 32-bit support.
Platforms: removed sparc-solaris.
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