Use differential testing for tectonic

[ligurio]

In ISSTA'24 there was a publication ¹ that described an automated differential testing pipeline for TeX engines and TeX Live distributions. The source code mentioned in the paper is available ². I suppose it would be useful to use this engine for testing tectonic as a part of regression testing.

// CC: @mrigger

Footnotes

1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3650212.3680370 ↩

2. https://github.com/jovyntls/inconsistencies-in-tex ↩

[Mrmaxmeier]

Hi, interesting reference. 🙂
While development on tectonic has slowed, we previously relied on bit-level reproducibility for regression testing. AFAIK (if this is still true), tectonic is the only TeX engine where this works / is an explicit goal. Over time, we'll have slowly drifted away from the underlying engine XeLaTeX though, so running an analysis of "semantic differences" might still be interesting.