Re: bogus "Negative repeat count does nothing" warnings on Autoconf manual

[Gavin Smith]

On 14 September 2016 at 00:22, Paul Eggert <address@hidden> wrote:
> I ran into this problem when building the Autoconf manual using Texinfo 6.3
> on Fedora 24, which has Perl 5.22.2. With the attached file (which is a
> stripped-down version of the manual), the command 'makeinfo autoconf.texi'
> complains:
>
>   Negative repeat count does nothing at
> /home/eggert/opt/Linux-x86_64/texinfo-6.3/share/texinfo/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm
> line 1038.
>   Negative repeat count does nothing at
> /home/eggert/opt/Linux-x86_64/texinfo-6.3/share/texinfo/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm
> line 1039.
>
> These complaints seem to be bogus. I expect this some sort of Perl
> compatibility issue.

Evidently this is a new warning message in perl. I put a statement to
print the value that was the operand to "x" (string multiplication),
and here was the result with your test file:

$ ../texi2any.pl autoconf.texi
1 at ../../tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm line 1038.
5 at ../../tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm line 1038.
9 at ../../tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm line 1038.
2 at ../../tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm line 1038.
10 at ../../tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm line 1038.
-1 at ../../tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm line 1038.
6 at ../../tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm line 1038.
10 at ../../tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm line 1038.
2 at ../../tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm line 1038.
60 at ../../tp/Texinfo/Convert/Plaintext.pm line 1038.

I guess that it shouldn't be -1. I'd guess it's due to the line:

before making Light, God split the Chaos into Land and Water; it takes a

being one character too long.

The solution would be to check if the variable is negative, and if it
is, don't do anything.

> PS. I suggest adding this as a test case for Texinfo, as it would be amusing
> to test Texinfo with Chaos....