[Bug: xemacs-beta tip] decade-old version of texinfo.tex

[Samuel Bronson]

On Wed, Oct 6, 2010 at 4:16 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> Samuel Bronson writes:
[...]
>  > installed, too. (But is someone like that really going to be expecting
>  > trouble-free TeXing of a 2010 version of a manual?)
>
> My feeling is that they shouldn't have to worry about it.  Period.  A
> policy of not caring if they annoy users who don't believe in
> "breaking what don't need no fixin' nohow" is one of the reasons I'm
> not interested in working on GNU Emacs.  I'd be very sad if anything
> we did caused unnecessary breakage for someone, although I won't veto
> it if somebody else really wants to do something about the old version
> of texinfo.tex.

Point, point.

> If modern makeinfo/texinfo.tex has some killer features that we just
> have to have, let us know about them.  (We do have a minimum version
> requirement for building the packages, although it's pretty old
> itself.)  Otherwise, what harm is done?

Okay, it turns out there is at least this very simple answer: "make
dvi" will fail with many/most current TeX distributions. The reason
for this is that the version of texinfo.tex in the tree uses the
conditional "\ifx\pdfoutput\undefined" to determine whether it is
being run under pdfTeX or not. Unfortunately, as explained on
<http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=ifpdf>, running under
pdfTeX doesn't actually imply that a PDF is desired, since many
distributions use the pdfTeX code for the "tex" command as well as for
the "pdftex" command. This has, of course, been fixed.

Moving on to "make pdf", I get dumped out to a TeX error prompt during
the building of "texinfo.pdf":

texi2dvi --pdf texinfo.texi
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-1.40.10 (MiKTeX 2.8)
entering extended mode
(E:\Documents\Code\xemacs-beta\man\texinfo.texi
(E:\Documents\Code\xemacs-beta\man\texinfo.tex
Loading texinfo [version 1999-09-25.10]: Basics, pdf,
("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.8\tex\plain\misc\pdfcolor.tex") fonts,
page headings, tables, conditionals, indexing, sectioning, toc, environments,
defuns, macros, cross references,
("C:\Program Files\MiKTeX 2.8\tex\generic\epsf\epsf.tex"
This is `epsf.tex' v2.7.3 <23 July 2005>
) localization, and turning on texinfo input format.) [1{C:/Documents and Setti
ngs/All Users/Application Data/MiKTeX/2.8/pdftex/config/pdftex.map}] [2]
[3] [4] (Texinfo Copying Conditions) Chapter 1 [1] [2]
Cross reference values unknown; you must run TeX again. [3] [4] [5] [6]
[7] [8] [9] [10] [11] Chapter 2 [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19]
[20] [21] [22] [23] Chapter 3 [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] [31] [32]
[33] [34] [35] [36] Chapter 4 [37] [38] [39] [40] Chapter 5 [41] [42] [43]

WARNING: for users of Unix TeX 3.0!
This manual trips a bug in TeX version 3.0 (tex hangs).
If you are running another version of TeX, relax.
If you are running Unix TeX 3.0, kill this TeX process.
 Then upgrade your TeX installation if you can.
 (See ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/TeX.README.)
If you are stuck with version 3.0, run the
 script ``tex3patch'' from the Texinfo distribution
 to use a workaround.

! Undefined control sequence.
@code ->@begingroup @catcode `@-=@active @let -
                                               @codedash @catcode `@_=@activ...

@addtokens ...ef @addtoks {@noexpand #1={@the #1#2
                                                  }}@addtoks
@skipspaces ... at else @addtokens {@filename }{@PP }
                                                  @advance @filenamelength b...
<argument>  @code
                  {@@appendix}
@getfilename ...ngth =0 at expandafter @skipspaces #1
                                                  |@relax
@xrefX ... at fi @ifpdf @leavevmode @getfilename {#4}
                                                  @ifnum @filenamelength >0 ...
l.4012 ... @code{@@unnumbered}, @code{@@appendix}}
                                                  ).
?

I'm not sure what causes this, but it does not occur with the version
of texinfo.tex from MiKTeX.

Another problem I'm seeing is that texi2dvi does not appear to repeat
tex runs when neededin order to get the references right, but that
seems to happen with both of these versions of texinfo.tex.

Oh, I've now found one issue with the version in MiKTeX: the outline
around @key{} doesn't seem to work right anymore (even though I can't
see any changes to the code for it) :-(