[tex-live] Technical showstoppers for TL2003

[Karl Berry]

    TL7 won't give you this result if your locale is set to FR_fr (or
    whatever syntax you should use). It will write an 'é' in the file.

Ah, thanks (to you too, Vladimir, for pointing this out).  Now I can
reproduce the problem, by setting LC_ALL=french.

    At the minimum, this change is not (yet) documented.

We can certainly document the change.

But the real question is, is the new behavior (and the resulting broken
packages) acceptable in practice?  From what you and Daniel reported, it
sounded like the problem was more widespread than a couple of verbatim
environments.

If it is, perhaps we need to go back to the TL7 behavior, one way or
another, and fix the various packages and programs for next year, and
reinstate the change then.  (Always assuming there is a next year.)

It does seem to me, as Vladimir said, that document processing depending
on the locale setting is bad for portability, and so the change is good
from that point of view.  But this is not my area of expertise, so I am
not sure of all the ramifications.