However, only if I'm sure that we will be able to incorporate this into the standalone pdftex tarball, and into texlive. Is there any documentation how Peter did it, and what needs to be done for simple updates?

He has put his material (patches + instructions; both excellent) here: ftp://ftpth.mppmu.mpg.de/pub/peb/web2c/autoconf/ Peter has also contacted several authors IIRC, so he might have additional information beyond this. And, as I already wrote, my current stuff is available from rsync://tug.org/tetexdevsrc/ and the migration has already happened there (Peter, I'd be happy if you look at this).

And are there any binaries in texlive that aren't in the teTeX tree and already converted?

I am not aware of any. Peter? Thomas