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

[Arthur O'Dwyer]

On Mon, Sep 3, 2012 at 6:21 PM, Norbert Preining <preining at logic.at> wrote:
> On Mon, 03 Sep 2012, Arthur O'Dwyer wrote:
>> Would it be possible for the next patch-release of TexLive to build
>> CWEAVE with the "longest_name" macro set to at least 3000?
>
> What do you mean with "patch-release" - please do NOT mix
> Debian and upstream TeX Live.

Well, as you know, I'm not an expert on the internal politics of
TeXLive, Debian, or Ubuntu/Canonical. So by "the next patch-release",
I just mean "whatever is the next update that will be seen by the end
user."  In other words: Today my /usr/bin/cweave has a bug. Sometime
in the future, something will happen that causes the
last-modified-time of /usr/bin/cweave to change. When that happens, it
would be nice if the new /usr/bin/cweave didn't have the bug anymore.

Obviously there are a lot of different "downstreams"; even addressing
the problem in Debian won't cause the bug to go away for Windows
users. But it seems like the *first* prerequisite is for someone to
address the problem in TeXLive itself, so that anyone who rsyncs with
tug.org::tldevsrc/Build/source/ will see the fix.

Beyond that... If this fix can be pushed downstream fast enough to get
into Ubuntu 12.10, that would be nice. If it misses the initial
release of Ubuntu 12.10 but shows up in "Update Manager" a few months
later --- I'm *pretty* sure I've seen occasional updates to texlive
come through there --- that would also be nice. If Ubuntu's packaging
gnomes don't get around to packaging a fixed version until 2015, that
would suck but there's nothing I can do about it. And so on, and so
forth.

Thanks,
-Arthur