texi2dvi does not generate dvi on Debian Etch and MacOS X

[Anton Ertl]

texi2dvi from texinfo 4.8 and 4.9 generates PDF instead of dvi on
Debian Etch, even when I ask for dvi with --dvi.

The reason seems to be that texi2dvi calls etex, and etex looks as
follows on this system:

lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Apr 10 11:48 /usr/bin/etex -> pdfetex*

Now maybe this is a configuration error on Debian, but I also have a
report that on MacOS X (with texinfo 4.8), the same thing happens, so
maybe this is some general new way of installing etex.

Hmm, the pdfetex man page says:

       In DVI mode, pdfeTeX can be used as a complete replacement of the e-TeX
       engine.

Unfortunately, even the advertised way of switching to DVI mode does
not work:

[c8:/raid0/anton/tmp/gforth/doc:9692] etex -output-format dvi gforth.texi
...
Output written on gforth.pdf (273 pages, 1772932 bytes).
...

The version of etex involved here is:

pdfeTeX using libpoppler 3.141592-1.21a-2.2 (Web2C 7.5.4)
kpathsea version 3.5.4


texi2dvi4a2ps (texi2dvi (GNU Texinfo 4.0) 0.43) works on the same
system (it calls tex, not etex).

- anton