Re: texinfo.tex 2016-05-07.20: "Tex capacity exceeded" with Emacs manuals

[Paul Eggert]

On 05/26/2016 08:20 AM, Gavin Smith wrote:

These instructions download several 100's of MB of a git repository
and I wasn't willing to let it finish. I tried the file
"emacs-lisp-intro.texi" from
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/emacs.git/tree/doc/lispintro, and
after editing the file a bit (so it didn't need other files), I
processed it with that version of texinfo.tex. Unfortunately, I wasn't
able to reproduce the error.

Thanks for looking into the problem.

OK, here's a smaller example taken from the Emacs source code. Unpack the attached tarball in a fresh directory, copy the latest Gnulib texinfo.tex into it, and run the shell command 'texi2pdf bovine.texi'. On my platform (Fedora 23 x86-64, texi2pdf (GNU Texinfo 6.0) 6363) the output says './bovine.toc:1: TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [input stack size=5000].' Full output log attached.

texinfo-bug.tgz
Description: application/compressed-tar

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.15 (TeX Live 2014) (preloaded 
format=pdfetex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
(./bovine.texi (./texinfo.tex Loading texinfo [version 2016-05-07.20]: pdf,
fonts, markup, glyphs, page headings, tables, conditionals, indexing,
sectioning, toc, environments, defuns, macros, cross references, insertions,
(/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/tex/generic/epsf/epsf.tex
This is `epsf.tex' v2.7.4 <14 February 2011>
) localization, formatting, and turning on texinfo input format.)
(./docstyle.texi) [1{/usr/share/texlive/texmf-dist/fonts/map/pdftex/updmap/pdft
ex.map}] [2] (./bovine.toc) [-1] (./bovine.toc) (./bovine.toc
./bovine.toc:1: TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [input stack size=5000].
@makevalueexpandable ->@let @value 
                                   = @expandablevalue @catcode `@-=@other @c...

@value ->@begingroup @makevalueexpandable 
                                          @valuexxx 
@makevalueexpandable ->@let @value 
                                   = @expandablevalue @catcode `@-=@other @c...

@value ->@begingroup @makevalueexpandable 
                                          @valuexxx 
@makevalueexpandable ->@let @value 
                                   = @expandablevalue @catcode `@-=@other @c...

@value ->@begingroup @makevalueexpandable 
                                          @valuexxx 
...
l.1 @unnchapentry{@value {TITLE}}{10001}{top}{1}
                                                
./bovine.toc:1:  ==> Fatal error occurred, no output PDF file produced!
Transcript written on bovine.log.
/usr/bin/texi2dvi: pdfetex exited with bad status, quitting.