Bug 2158820

Summary: tabu incompatible with longtable in TeXLive 2022
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: Jerry James <loganjerry>
Component: texliveAssignee: Tom "spot" Callaway <spotrh>
Status: CLOSED RAWHIDE QA Contact: Fedora Extras Quality Assurance <extras-qa>
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Version: rawhideCC: caznaranl, spotrh, than
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Last Closed: 2023-01-08 16:08:01 UTC Type: Bug
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Description Jerry James 2023-01-06 17:05:18 UTC
Description of problem:
The TeXLive 2022 update caused the metamath package to fail to build. The end of the build log looks like this:

! Dimension too large.
\LT@max@sel #1#2->{\ifdim #2=\wd \tw@ 
                                      #1\else \number \c@LT@chunks \fi }{\th...
l.7886 \end{longtabu}
                     
? 
! Emergency stop.
\LT@max@sel #1#2->{\ifdim #2=\wd \tw@ 
                                      #1\else \number \c@LT@chunks \fi }{\th...
l.7886 \end{longtabu}
                     
!  ==> Fatal error occurred, no output PDF file produced!
Transcript written on metamath.log.

The issue is an incompatibility with newer versions of the longtable package, as described here: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/600724/dimension-too-large-after-recent-longtable-update

According to the discussion at that URL, tabu is hopelessly broken.  Perhaps it should be removed altogether?  I will speak with metamath upstream about not using it anymore.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
texlive-tabu-svn61719-62.fc38

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Do a Rawhide mock build of the metamath package
2.
3.

Actual results:
The build fails while attempting to build the manual.

Expected results:
Apparently that is the expected result. :-)

Additional info:

Comment 1 Jerry James 2023-01-06 17:41:36 UTC
The discussion at the referenced URL indicates that the tabulararray package might be a good alternative to tabu, but it doesn't seem to be available from Fedora at present.

Comment 2 Tom "spot" Callaway 2023-01-06 18:03:24 UTC
I know it feels like it, but we don't actually package up every single CTAN component in texlive... Only those necessary for the base, collections, and scheme metapackages.

I can add tabulararray if it solves this issue (assuming there are no licensing issues or anything).

I'll look at this later today.

Comment 3 Jerry James 2023-01-06 18:13:57 UTC
I'm open to anything that will fix the metamath build.  It seems there is a patch for tabu, but there is no reason to expect that tabu won't just break again with the next TeXLive update.

If I'm the only packager interested in tabulararray, then I can package and submit it.

Thanks for all the work you do on the TeX stack.  It sure is a huge beast, even if you don't package every single CTAN component. :-)

Comment 4 Tom "spot" Callaway 2023-01-08 16:08:01 UTC
The new component referenced in the stackoverflow link is "tabularray" which did get added in the texlive-2022 package already. 

I also applied the change referenced in the github issue and it seems to resolve the build issue with metamath in my local testing. Please retry with texlive-2022-63.fc38, which is now in rawhide.