[tex-live] uninitialized line number in pdfTeX

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Sun Aug 14 01:16:24 CEST 2011


      MALLOC_PERTURB_=69
      MALLOC_CHECK_=3

Ah.  I can reproduce with those settings.  Now to look into the code and
get the variable initialized.

Aside: do you happen to know if these are canonical features of glibc or
introduced somewhere downstream?  I ask because they are not mentioned
in the current libc manual (http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/) --
MALLOC_CHECK_ with values <=2 is discussed, but not 3, and
MALLOC_PERTURB_ is not mentioned.  So if they are in the base glibc, as
I expect they are, we should report a documentation bug.

    BTW, value 0 looks wrong for me also...  

I speculate that it (and the uninitialized value in the first place) is
due to the source file using macros, and macros being treated
essentially like files in the implementation (of \scantokens in eTeX).
There is no access to the "real" line number at the TeX level, last I
looked into it.  It's been a longstanding problem.

Thanks,
karl


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