Re: gendocs bug?

[Karl Berry]

Hi Eric,

    I don't know if this is a gendocs.sh bug or a texi2dvi bug.

It's TeX itself, actually.

    | ~->\penalty 
    |             address@hidden \ 

~ is an active character in (plain) TeX (the Texinfo equivalent is
@tie{}).  Texinfo resets ~ to be a normal character, but the filename
is read before Texinfo is.  You could build a so-called TeX "format" to
get around this, but I doubt you want to go there if you're not already
familiar with TeX.  (It couldn't be done by default, either.)

Although TeX has some (relatively recent) mechanisms for quoting
filenames, I think that attempting to use them would cause more trouble
than it's worth.  In general, it's unfortunately not possible to use
arbitrary filenames with TeX.

So, about all I can imagine to do is have texi2dvi tell you to rename if
the filename contains a ~ (or other "bad" characters), and then give up,
so you don't get the mysterious TeX error.

    TMPDIR to work around the problem.

That's the right thing to do :).

Best,
k