Documentation build regressions

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2018, Joseph Myers wrote:

> > > What texinfo.tex gets used?  Is it the one from the binutils-gdb source 
> > > tree (which is over nine years old) or one from your TeX installation (and 
> > > if the latter, which version is it)?
> > 
> > It is true it did not work when GDB doc build picked the shipped texinfo.tex.
> 
> Thanks.  In that case I advise that Maciej tries updating the shipped 
> texinfo.tex to the current version - 
> svn://svn.savannah.gnu.org/texinfo/trunk/doc/texinfo.tex - to see if that 
> helps with the observed problem.

 Thanks for the suggestion.

 I have tried that, however that didn't change anything.  I am able to 
build `gdb.pdf' on another system though, which has:

This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.16 (TeX Live 2015/Debian) (preloaded format=pdfetex 2018.5.30)  4 JUN 2018 20:59

so it looks to me like either triggering a bug in the old version or using 
a feature present in the new version only.  I have no strong opinion on 
whether we should require a recent enough version of TeX or if we ought to 
work with any version we might encounter.

 FWIW I have always considered TeX a pretty conservative tool and I'm 
quite surprised to see it fail in a version-dependent manner.

  Maciej