Re: Bug in current version of Texinfo

[David Kastrup]

Karl Berry <address@hidden> writes:

>     The blank line introduced
>
> Sorry for my dumb typo, and failing to notice it for so long.

That's the surprising part.  The effects were not subtle.  Maybe print
output is not all that relevant to people these days.

> Fixed.
>
> BTW, bug-texinfo and texinfo-devel (and everything else) get equal
> billing in my mailbox, so you don't need to worry about resending to
> different lists in the future.
>
>     
> http://svn.savannah.gnu.org/viewvc/trunk/doc/texinfo.tex?annotate=6083&root=texinfo#l8956
>
> BTW 2, does that url actually work for you?

No, but when I view the commit diff on Savannah, I get per-line links
like that.  So I used them as reference on the assumption that they
_should_ be working, really.

> Just wondering.  I get "an exception has occurred", evidently because
> something (viewvc?)  thinks texinfo.tex is a binary file.  Anyway ...

Well, could be worth fixing if people actually want to browse the repo
on Savannah...  No idea who'd be able to fix however.

By the way, LilyPond carries some patches of its own since Texinfo some
time in the last years decided to make \ catcode 0 when reading index
files IIRC.  Since we are indexing quite a few terms actually containing
\ in their name, that was a no-go for us.  There is some rationale in
the comments for your change but it does not make all that much sense to
me and seems to be, if at all, valid for a more obscure use case than
ours.

Let's see:

+% LilyPond CHANGE: The following definition has been reverted to the
+% original definition since it was problematic in the context of
+% indexing.
+
 \def\macroargctxt{% used when scanning invocations
   \scanctxt
-  \catcode`\\=0
+%  \catcode`\\=0
+  \catcode`\\=\other
 }
 % why catcode 0 for \ in the above?  To recognize \\ \{ \} as "escapes"
 % for the single characters \ { }.  Thus, we end up with the "commands"
 % that would be written @\ @{ @} in a Texinfo document.
-% 
+%

Oh, and as you can see with the last two lines in that quoted change,
texinfo.tex is rather full of whitespace errors (mostly trailing spaces
at line ends).  That's also sort of a nuisance, and TeX strips them out
anyway at a very low reading level (before even adding \endlinechar) so
there is no good reason not to do a whitespace cleanup pass on the file.

All the best

-- 
David Kastrup