[tex-live] TexLive version of CWEB can't handle strings >1024 characters

[Arthur O'Dwyer]

To clarify: When I say "Levy and Knuth's original", I'm referring to
the version of cweave.w that's found in cweb.tar.gz downloadable from
this web page:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/cweb.html

In this version (dated 2008-04-28), "longest_name" is defined to 10000.

-Arthur

On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 5:53 PM, Arthur O'Dwyer
<arthur.j.odwyer at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:
>> Hi Arthur,
>>
>>> CWEAVE 3.64 (TeX Live 2009/Debian)
>>
>> First of all to make a few things clear:
>> - this is a list for the development of TeX Live
>> - TeX Live 2012 has been released a few months ago from TUG
>> - your question is Debian/Ubuntu specific and should be asked
>>   at the appropriate places, which is not here, but some
>>   Ubuntu support channel
>
> The only way your statement could be true is if TeX Live doesn't
> actually include CWEAVE. I admit it's been a long time since I
> installed it, so it's *possible* that I got CWEB from some other
> source, rather than from the official TeX Live distribution.
>
> But!  I did some more googling, and found a way to download the
> official TeX Live sources:
>
> http://www.tug.org/texlive/build.html
>> rsync -a --delete --exclude=.svn tug.org::tldevsrc/Build/source/ /your/dir/
>
> So I did this, and looked at the macros defined by TeX Live's
> distribution of CWEAVE.
>
> ajo at ubuntu:/tmp$ rsync -a --delete --exclude=.svn
> tug.org::tldevsrc/Build/source/ ./texlive-2012
> ajo at ubuntu:/tmp$ cd texlive-2012/texk/web2c/cwebdir
> ajo at ubuntu:/tmp/texlive-2012/texk/web2c/cwebdir$ grep longest_name
> cweave.w | head -1
> @d longest_name 1000 /* section names and strings shouldn't be longer
> than this */
>
> Ah-HA! TeX Live's build of CWEAVE is setting longest_name to 1000.
> This is Too Short; it results in garbage output when string literals
> exceed 1000 characters. I recommend using Levy & Knuth's original
> value of 10000.
>
> Would it be possible for the next patch-release of TexLive to build
> CWEAVE with the "longest_name" macro set to at least 3000?
>
>
>> The next version of TeX Live for Debian is already in Debian sid and
>> testing and will be included in the soon to be released Debian stable.
>> In Ubuntu it is included in the current dev branch and will be in the 12.10
>> release.
>
> I'm not sure how your statement is relevant. I understand that it
> could take a long time for any new changes in TeX Live to propagate
> down into Ubuntu's package system --- and in particular that I
> shouldn't expect upgrading my Ubuntu system to 12.10 to magically fix
> the problem --- but that doesn't mean that
>> there is nothing else we can do now.
> I think I've pointed out a real deficiency in the CWEAVE currently
> distributed with TeX Live (a deficiency which does not exist in
> Levy/Knuth's original), and in this followup email I've even gone so
> far as to pinpoint the exact line in the current TeXLive sources
> hosted on tug.org. Tell me where to send the patch, and I'll patch it
> for you too. :)
>
>> You could think about installing the TeX Live 2012 backport for Ubuntu
>> (please search yourself), or even better, just install the normal
>> upstream TeX Live as provided from tug.org.
>
> If this deficiency gets fixed in TeX Live 2013, I'll definitely
> consider upgrading to TeX Live 2013. It is *not* fixed in TeX Live
> 2012, so there's no point in my upgrading yet.
>
> Thanks,
> -Arthur