Posted today to the LaTeX-L list by Javier Bezos

Babel gets back on track and it is again actively maintained. The goals are mainly to fix bugs, to make it compatible with XeTeX and LuaTeX (as far as possible), and perhaps to add some minor new features (provided they are backward compatible).

No attempt will be done to take full advantage of the features provided by XeTeX and LuaTeX, which would require a completely new core (as for example polyglossia or as part of LaTeX3).

Your comments or suggestions (or questions!) are welcomed.

Hopefully we’ll see some long-standing babel bugs sorted out in the near future: many thanks to Javier for taking this up!