bug#23611: generating pdf manuals fails with TeX capacity exceeded

[Glenn Morris]

Package: emacs
Version: 25.0.94

Trying to make the pdf versions of the manuals on RHEL 7.2 fails for
some of them (lispintro, bovine, semantic, srecode, tramp, wisent).
It works if one uses the texinfo.tex from emacs-24. (I have often
wondered if commits like 9c2a1a264cf418 are a good idea during
pretesting.)

The errors are of the form:

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.1415926-2.5-1.40.14 (TeX Live 2013)

[...]

(./emacs-lisp-intro.toc) (./emacs-lisp-intro.toc
./emacs-lisp-intro.toc:171: 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.171 ...unction}{13.1}{@value {COUNT-WORDS}}{145}
                                                  
./emacs-lisp-intro.toc:171:  ==> Fatal error occurred, no output PDF file produ
ced!
Transcript written on emacs-lisp-intro.log.
/usr/bin/texi2dvi: pdfetex exited with bad status, quitting.
make: *** [emacs-lisp-intro.pdf] Error 1