[help-texinfo] Octave fails to build with texinfo.tex changes to @sortas

[Mike Miller]

Hi,

GNU Octave's user manual fails to build with the current texinfo.tex.
The error is "/usr/bin/texi2dvi: texindex failed". I bisected the
texinfo repository to find the first commit that produces this error and
landed on:

commit 0539d4e685a2185dd46d676d0b3f8862493bf8bd
Author: Gavin Smith <address@hidden>
Date:   Thu Feb 28 19:13:39 2019 +0000

    Better support for @sortas at end of index entry.

    * doc/texinfo.tex (\dosubindwrite): Use \eatspaces to trim
    leading and trailing spaces from the index entry.  This means a
    @sortas command can occur at the end of the index entry with a
    space before it, and the space will be removed when writing to
    the index file.
    (\sortas): Expand to empty.
    (\dosubind): Do not set \toks0: use a \def instead to store the
    index entry text.

 ChangeLog       | 13 +++++++++++++
 doc/texinfo.tex | 27 ++++++++++++++-------------
 2 files changed, 27 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)

Octave does indeed use the @sortas macro, but it's not clear to me at
the moment if one of those is the source of the error. I've attached a
list of all direct uses of @sortas in Octave for convenience. There are
many more index entries that don't explicitly use @sortas. Any help
would be much appreciated.

Thanks,

-- 
mike