Re: Argument of \\ has an extra } ??

[Gavin Smith]

On 6 July 2015 at 01:42, Norbert Preining <address@hidden> wrote:
> sorry for the noise. The problem lies with octave shipping an ancient
> texinfo.tex (2009?).

For what it's worth, I just had the exact same problem trying to
compile an old gawk manual (for gawk 3.1.4), again breaking on a line

\initial {\\}

I wondered if it could be a difference with texindex 6.0. I tried with
texindex 5.2, and the *.cps file contained instead

\initial {{\tt \indexbackslash }}

(The unwanted definition

\gdef\\#1pt{#1}}

comes from line 682 of plain.tex.)

It's unfortunate that compilation of older software packages should be
broken in this way. I wonder if there's any way for texindex to output
something that is very likely to work with a bundled texinfo.tex file
regardless of its version.