Brittleness with texinfo and version numbering

[John W. Eaton]

On 12-Oct-2009, address@hidden wrote:

| The current octave development version number is 3.3.50+.  The '+'
| character is rather special in UNIX naming and in this case it is
| breaking the macro @verbatiminclude which is used, for example, in oop.texi.
| 
| The actual problem is the value of abs_top_srcdir.  For Mercurial
| archives this is whatever the user named the directory when cloning the
| repository.  In my case I just used the name 'octave-dev' and my
| Mercurial code compiles fine.  However, if one does 'make dist' the
| resulting file includes the version (octave-3.3.50+.tar.gz) and this
| code will extract to the directory octave-3.3.50+ and will not compile
| the documentation.
| 
| Offhand I can think of two simple solutions.
| 1) Stop using '+' or other special characters in version numbering
| 2) Switch from absolute srcdir naming to relative path naming (../../
| avoids any reference to octave-3.3.50+)
| 
| Which solution does the community prefer?

I think this is a but in Texinfo.  If I create a directory called foo+
and process the file

  \input texinfo
  @setfilename foo.info
  @set srcdir foo+
  @verbatiminclude @value{srcdir}/foo
  @bye

with tex, I see the following error:

  $ tex foo.texi
  This is TeX, Version 3.141592 (Web2C 7.5.6)
  (./foo.texi (/usr/share/texmf/tex/texinfo/texinfo.tex
  Loading texinfo [version 2008-04-18.10]: pdf, fonts, page headings, tables,
  conditionals, indexing, sectioning, toc, environments, defuns, macros,
  cross references, insertions,
  (/usr/share/texmf-texlive/tex/generic/epsf/epsf.tex
  This is `epsf.tex' v2.7.3 <23 July 2005>
  ) localization, formatting, and turning on texinfo input format.) (./foo.aux)
  ! I can't find file `foo{'.
  <to be read again> 
                     @fam 
  @tt ->@fam 
             address@hidden @setfontstyle {tt}
  +->address@hidden 
          @char 43}
  @value ... not address@hidden @csname address@hidden 
                                                    @fi 
  <argument> @value {srcdir}
                            /foo
  @doverbatiminclude ...ble @setupverbatim @input #1
                                                     @afterenvbreak }
  l.7 @verbatiminclude @value{srcdir}/foo

  Please type another input file name: 

If I comment out the "@setfilename foo.info" line it works.  Also,
makeinfo can process this either way.

Would you please report the problem to the Texinfo maintainers?

Thanks,

jwe