Comment # 19 on bug 1040434 from Dr. Werner Fink

(In reply to Leon Meier from comment #17)
> Well, there is apparently an interconnection between fontspec and other
> components of texlive which I was not aware of when filing that bug. It
> seems to me that the update of fontspec was a necessary step but not a
> sufficient one. After all, Debian with TL 2016 seems to have done its
> packaging job properly such that the bug does not occur there. There are
> dozens of differences between their packaging and OpenSuse packaging, and
> the most striking one is their newer version of fontspec.

Debian does use follow upstream at each update as the Norbert has the time to
do this. I've not. And yes the original fontspec of the original TeXLive 2016
is not perfect but fits the definition found in the LaTeX kernel engine. Even
packaging is open source and you might help here to get more perfect