I have stumbled several times after an update to the LaTeX core, either 2e or 3. Isn't there a procedure that announces to developers or maintainers of affected packages to check their compatibility against the update?
IMHO, I think that waiting for users' posts to manifest is a rather primitive procedure.
1 Answer
We are trying hard to identify possibly affected packages in case of changes or additions beforehand by analysing the contents of the TeX Live texmf tree and then informing the developers beforehand, but obviously that is a process that can't be automated and there is a high liklyhood that we overlook a case. Furthermore if changes affect code in the preamble of documents or in locally installed files not in the general distributions then there is clearly no way for us to identify that.
To improve the situation we established the concept of the latex-dev formats which contain an unreleased/beta version of the next LaTeX2e kernel and which can be easily used by package authors (or other interested folks) to test their documents against an upcoming release so that any issues can be identified before that release hits the streets. The procedure is simple and works without the need to install anything (as the beta is part of the main Tex distributions), see https://www.latex-project.org/news/2019/09/01/LaTeX-dev-format/ for details.
Of course, that requires that the developer test!
Anouncements that a beta is ready for testing will be done through multiple channels, e.g. in the news feed of our web site but also elsewhere.
answered Oct 25, 2019 at 7:37
expl3: there is a big test suite, but the number of use cases is so large it's not all testable.