On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 12:02 AM, David Kastrup <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> We would not want to have an external package dependency like that if we
> wanted to make this part of the LaTeX base package.  So we would likely
> check for \XeTeXversion ourselves here.

Oh, of course :)

> Also we would not want to go over Jonathan's head here: are you in
> contact with him?  We certainly would want to provide a solution that
> does not mess up his plans and the typical use cases of XeTeX users.

Well, the discussion here has flourished rather more than I expected
it would. He's not too fussed about the LaTeX side of things (broadly
speaking) and I'm sure he'd certainly be happy if inputenc was less of
a hassle for new users. I'll keep him informed via the XeTeX mailing
list of the result of the discussion here. (If it's fixed in LaTeX
proper, it's out of his, and my, hands; if we write our own inputenc
then he might have more to say about it.)

Will