David Kastrup wrote:
Anyway, is something like that an area that LuaTeX would actually ever consider touching?
Perhaps one day, but definately not soon. There are a few ways out of this, but they all require dimens to occupy more than 32 bits internally, a step not to be taken lightly.
After all, it would break document compatibility.
In this particular case, I would not worry too much about that. Updated executables, hyphenation patterns, or font metrics will have a much deeper inpact on line breaking, and I very much doubt anybody has actually saved their old versions of those files alongside their input file.
Which might be, I believe, less of a holy grail for ConTeXt than for LaTeX.
Holy grail or Red herring? It has never been true that all different versions of TeX produce identical output in all cases. Identical versions of TeX should produce identical output on all platforms, but that is where it stops. The results from TeX 3.14 can be different from TeX 3.141592, even without any other change to your installation. Best, Taco