Hello all, Following the 2015-01-01 LaTeX2e update the team have been working on further 'modern' engine support. In particular, we have been examining how to integrate functionality provided by the contributed "luatexbase" into the kernel. This package provides allocators for a range of LuaTeX-specific registers and Lua functions which require similar low-level support. Working with the authors of luatexbase we have now established a clear idea of what needs to be adjusted in the kernel and what should remain in the contributed tree. Our current approach is to add the allocator code to the kernel, with this also available as a new "ltluatex.tex" file for plain TeX users and for those with older kernels. The concept of stacks for category code tables will be made available as a new package ctablestack, while we plan to provide a 'transitional' "luatexbase.sty" to allow a smooth transition from the existing contributed code to the new kernel support. (We are thankful to the current luatexbase authors for both their code and keenness to move to this new position). The kernel part of the code is available from http://latex-project.org/svnroot/latex2e-public/trunk/base/ltluatex.dtx whilst the package part is available from https://github.com/josephwright/ltluatexsupp (The latter will be supported by David Carlisle and me rather than formally by the team as a whole.) The team have been working carefully to check that the changes we are planning will largely be transparent to end users. Some package authors will already have had requests from the team to make minor code adjustments to help with this process. Experience with the previous LaTeX2e update suggests that significant testing will not occur until a CTAN release of the code, but we would welcome any feedback at this stage. Importantly, the team have been carefully considering to the current naming of LuaTeX-specific primitives. Whilst we understand the logic in giving them the \luatex... prefix, but we feel that this is overall more of a complicating factor than an aid. In particular, whilst LuaTeX is not yet 'stable' the addition of new primitives is carefully managed and unlikely to impact on existing documents. We are therefore currently planning to drop the prefixing and provide the LuaTeX primitives with their native names. We have been working with package authors to assist in this transition, which can be reverted using the latexrelease system. In addition to these changes, the new LaTeX2e release will feature bug fixes in the tools tree and an update of the Unicode data file introduced in the last release to incorporate Unicode 8.0.0 changes. The current plan is that a release will occur in October. Regards, Joseph