Re: xetex update via tlmgr fails

    First, even after selecting "custom-scheme" and paring down the
    collections, removing "XeTeX and packages", not only is the xetex
    executable still installed

For the record, I've rearranged the arrangement of packages into
collection so that if collection-xetex is omitted, the xetex binary is
not installed. (r78607)

    the initial fmtutil run tries to build the related
    formats, and fails *silently*.
    ...
    fmtutil gets some extra options there like "--no-strict",
    maybe that is it?

Yes, that is exactly why. As I recall, we pass that option in install-tl
because it seemed better for the installation to complete, even if some
formats failed to build. More likely than not, the user does not
actually care about the formats that failed because of some obscure
reason, like missing libfontconfig.so.

However, I guess we should at least report the formats that failed, and
thus future tlmgr updates will fail (because tlmgr uses --strict), and
suggest what to do about it. I'll look into it. --thanks, karl.