[tex-live] featpost and/or metapost problem in TeX Live 2009 tree

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

I have a small MetaPost file that works fine with the TeX Live 2007
distribution, but when I use a freshly-updated (today) TeX Live 2009
tree, I get a failure before I even load that file:

    % echo $path
    /usr/local/share/lib/tex/texlive-2009-07/bin/x86_64-linux /bin /usr/bin

    % make featpost.mem
    mpost -ini featpost.mp
    This is MetaPost, version 1.206 (kpathsea version 5.0.0) (INIMP)

    (/home/archive/share/lib/tex/texlive-2009-07/texmf-dist/metapost/featpost/featpost.mp
    (/home/archive/share/lib/tex/texlive-2009-07/texmf-dist/metapost/base/plain.mp
    Preloading the plain mem file, version 1.004)
    (/home/archive/share/lib/tex/texlive-2009-07/texmf-dist/metapost/featpost/featpost3Dplus2D.mp
    Preloading FeatPost macros, version 0.6.7) )
    Beginning to dump on file featpost.mem
     (mem=featpost 2009.09.10)
    at most 1517 strings of total length 9389
    25248 memory locations dumped; current usage is 3503&21680
    1272 symbolic tokens
    Transcript written on featpost.log.

    % mpost -ini mpost.mp
    This is MetaPost, version 1.207 (kpathsea version 5.0.0) (INIMP)
    (/home/archive/share/lib/tex/texlive-2009-07/texmf-dist/metapost/base/mpost.mp
    (/home/archive/share/lib/tex/texlive-2009-07/texmf-dist/metapost/base/plain.mp
    Preloading the plain mem file, version 1.004) )
    Beginning to dump on file mpost.mem
     (mem=mpost 2009.09.10)
    at most 745 strings of total length 3693
    3412 memory locations dumped; current usage is 1036&2302
    507 symbolic tokens
    Transcript written on mpost.log.

    % mpost -mem featpost
    This is MetaPost, version 1.206 (kpathsea version 5.0.0)
    (/home/archive/share/lib/tex/texlive-2009-07/texmf-dist/metapost/featpost/featpost.mp
    (/home/archive/share/lib/tex/texlive-2009-07/texmf-dist/metapost/base/plain.mp
    Preloading the plain mem file, version 1.004
    ! Redundant equation.
    <to be read again>
		       ;
    l.324 mm=2.83464;
			   pt=0.99626;        dd=1.06601;      bp:=1;

I can reproduce this on at least Solaris SPARC, Solaris AMD64, and
GNU/Linux AMD64, and likely others.

The featpost.mp file from TeX Live 2009 matches exactly the current
version in CTAN.

Does anyone else get this behavior, and if so, is there an obvious
fix?

My suspicion is that because featpost.mp is file-dated 11-Jan-2006, it
has not been updated to match the many recent changes to MetaPost.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                    FAX: +1 801 581 4148                  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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