[tex-k] Issues compiling web2c

[Karl Berry]

    David-Carter-Hitchins-iMac:web2c-7.5.4 

This is quite old.  If you feel like building the current sources
instead, see http://tug.org/texlive/build.html.  And/or if you are just
wanting to use TeX, see http://tug.org/mactex.

    So this error means that one of the types is not recognised?  

Probably.

    I did some searching but got lost in a maze of conditional includes!

Adding -dD -E to the gcc command line 
will output the macro definitions inline with the sources.
I often use this to figure out what got #define'd to what.

    Anyone got any clue what is going on here?

Not at this late date.

    Google searching showed that it was something like 'trie_size' was
    too low, but I changed that to 4 million in texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf in
    the source but no luck.  

The trie_size-related definitions in tex.ch might have to be changed.

    Is there any switch I can put on tex to trap the error?  

No, but you could avoid including all the hyphenation patterns.
(I can't give you a recipe, sorry.)

Trying to use the circa-2004 web2c 7.5.4 with the TL 2010 macro tree
seems doomed to failure, however.

k