TeXlive shapshot in artful was taken at an unfortunate time when TeXlive was rather buggy

[Sergio Callegari]

The TeXLive snapshot in artful fails to compile many conforming LaTeX documents. This is due to the fact that the snapshot was taken at a time when many packages were broken by some other changes.

Notably:

1) A recent l3kernel update, made the \bool_if:n(TF) boolean expression evaluation greedy. This broke *many* packages, including acro, media9 (and many other packages based on l3). All these package were quickly updated to cope with the new l3kernel, but the TeXlive shipped in artful manages sampling the time after the l3kernel change and before the package updates.

See https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/383018/acro-package-provides-missing-number-treated-as-zero-after-update-to-acro

2) the version of fontspec included in artful gives tons of warning on lualatex regarding features only available in xetex. This is actually due to

*************************************************
* fontspec warning: "only-xetex-feature"
*
* Ignored XeTeX only feature: 'HyphenChar'.
*************************************************

This is due to missing adjustment of the \defaultfontfeatures in fontspec.cfg.

These are no issues for users of the real TeXLive that regularly gets updates via the texlive manager. The fact that tlmgr does not work (well? at all?) even in user mode in ubuntu, plus the fact that texlive does not generally get updated to newer snapshot through the distro history means that the artful texlive is in a painful state for many users of LaTeX.

Please, provide some updates to the texlive distro in artful.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.10
Package: texlive 2017.20170818-1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.13.0-16.19-generic 4.13.4
Uname: Linux 4.13.0-16-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.7-0ubuntu3.1
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Fri Nov 3 17:16:29 2017
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationDate: Installed on 2013-12-12 (1421 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 13.10 "Saucy Salamander" - Release amd64 (20131016.1)
PackageArchitecture: all
SourcePackage: texlive-base
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to artful on 2017-10-26 (8 days ago)