bug#23611: texinfo.tex 2016-05-07.20: "Tex capacity exceeded" with Emacs manuals

[Gavin Smith <gavinsmith0123@gmail.com>]

On 25 May 2016 at 19:08, Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> wrote:
> texinfo.tex version 2016-05-07.20 (the current version in Gnulib) causes
> what appears to be runaway recursion when used to make PDF files for GNU
> Emacs. The Emacs bug report is here:
>
> http://bugs.gnu.org/23611
>
> To reproduce the problem on a Fedora 23 x86-64 machine with build tools
> installed, you can run these shell commands:
>
> git clone git://git.savannah.gnu.org/emacs.git emacs-bug
> cd emacs-bug
> git checkout 1ee91bf89176251f6e399c8436dca0248cdd6f6b
> ./autogen.sh all
> ./configure
> make pdf

These instructions download several 100's of MB of a git repository
and I wasn't willing to let it finish. I tried the file
"emacs-lisp-intro.texi" from
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/doc/lispintro, and
after editing the file a bit (so it didn't need other files), I
processed it with that version of texinfo.tex. Unfortunately, I wasn't
able to reproduce the error. I did find one problem, though: some
entries in the tables of contents, like 13.1, have "{No value for
``COUNT-WORDS''} " instead of the proper value. That's likely been
brought in by the same change, and needs to be fixed. The change was
to expand @value when the table of contents file was read in, and not
when it was written out: however, in this file the @value is only
given a value (with @set) after the @insertcopying command. I
understand that this should work. I'll have a look at it. If I
remember correctly, I made this change in the first place to prevent a
similar infinite recursion error happening when writing an undefined
@value to an auxiliary file.