babel-french legacy compatibility broken

[David Carlisle]

The texlive maintainers can only distribute babel as found  on ctan. To
report issues in the babel sources please use

https://github.com/latex3/babel/issues

That said, your file runs without error for me in an up to date texlive.

\l at french should be defined in the format:


$ latex '\makeatletter\show\l at french'
This is pdfTeX, Version 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.21 (TeX Live 2020) (preloaded
format=latex)
 restricted \write18 enabled.
entering extended mode
LaTeX2e <2020-02-02> patch level 3
L3 programming layer <2020-02-21>
> \l at french=\char"1C.
<*> \makeatletter\show\l at french


It appears that you have made formats without French hyphenation loaded.


David


On Sat, 22 Feb 2020 at 07:13, Stefan Löffler <st.loeffler at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I am maintaining a document that should be typeset-able with both old and
> new versions of TL. As it uses French in some places, I am using babel with
> the "frenchb" option (which is deprecated and should eventually be replaced
> by "french", but this would break typesetting on older systems).
> Unfortunately, this gives an error now (I'm not sure how long the situation
> has been like this as changes to my document a fairly infrequent).
>
> Here's a MWE:
> ---------------------8<--------------------------------
>
> \documentclass{minimal}
>
> \usepackage[frenchb]{babel}
>
> \begin{document}
>
> Bonjour le monde.
>
> \end{document}
>
> ---------------------8<-------------------------------- Which gives the
> following error:
>
> (/usr/local/texlive/2019/texmf-dist/tex/generic/babel-french/frenchb.ldf
>
> ! Undefined control sequence.
>
> l.30 \chardef\l at frenchb\l at french
>
> The same problem occurs if I use the (also deprecated) option "francais"
> instead of "frenchb".
>
> If I change \chardef to \let on the indicated line, everything seems to
> work as expected - but I'm not sure if that's the correct solution (and
> what side-effects it might have). If it is, it should also be applied (at
> least) to the "francais" case.
>
> The problem occurs with both pdflatex and lualatex (I haven't checked
> others).
>
> Some possibly relevant versions:
>
> babel: 3.40)
>
> babel-french: 3.5g
>
> pdfTeX 3.14159265-2.6-1.40.20
>
> luatex: 1.10.0
>
> HTH,
>
> Stefan
>
>
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