Re: xetex update via tlmgr fails

    not only is the xetex executable still installed (with a dangling
    shared library requirement), 

It's sad, but I'm not surprised. There are so many dependencies.
Will have to look into exactly what is causing xetex still to be
included in this case. Perhaps some random package in some other
collection.

    but the initial fmtutil run tries to build the related formats, and
    fails *silently*.

Argh. Another bug.

    this is an extremely unfortunate inconsistency between the error
    message and the syntax needed to work around the error, 

Well, that at least is easy to fix. Thanks for noting that and following
up. -k