From bug-request at octave dot org Fri Oct 15 09:49:48 2004
Subject: Infinite loop in build of octave-2.1.60
From: "Nelson H. F. Beebe" <beebe at math dot utah dot edu>
To: bug-octave at bevo dot che dot wisc dot edu
Cc: beebe at math dot utah dot edu
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 2004 06:37:17 -0500

I attempted a few builds of the latest octave release from

	ftp://ftp.che.wisc.edu/pub/octave/bleeding-edge/octave-2.1.60.tar.gz

and to my surprise, on Sun Solaris, GNU/Linux on IA-32, and GNU/Linux
on IA-64, the build went into an infinite loop, consuming hours of
time before I noticed and interrupted them.  Even more peculiar, the
loop happens like this:

	dvips -o octave.ps octave.dvi
	This is dvips 5.60.1 Copyright 1986, 1996 Radical Eye Software
	' TeX output 2004.10.14:1846' -> octave.ps
	<tex.pro>. [1] [2] [-1] [-2] [-3] [-4] [-5] [-6] [-7] [-8] [1] [2] [3] [4] 
	[5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] [20] 
	...
	[356] [357] [358] [359] [360] [361] [362] [363] [364] [365] [366] [367] [368] 
	[369texi2html -expandinfo -split_chapter -I . -I ./.. octave.texi
	] [370] 
	[process killed]

Since dvips versions vary from site to site, I wonder whether you see
the same behavior in Wisconsin.  At my site, we run

	% dvips -V
	This is dvips 5.60.1 Copyright 1986, 1996 Radical Eye Software
	...

This is about the last version before it got kpathsea-converted, and
made incompatible with our very large TeX installation.

However, the loop could also be in texi2html.  Our version is

	% texi2html --version
	1.70

That program is a perl script, which invokes:

	% /usr/local/bin/perl --version
	This is perl, v5.8.3 built for sun4-solaris

(ditto on IA-64), and

	% /usr/local/bin/perl --version
	This is perl, v5.6.1 built for i686-linux

on IA-32.

Do you see this same behavior?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- 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 dot utah dot edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm dot org  beebe@computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe  -
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