hitex.fmt fails to build at Utah

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

This morning, I ran updates in our TeX Live 2023 tree on an Ubuntu
20.04 system, and noticed a complaint that hitex.fmt was not built.

I attempted to do so manually with

	% fmtutil-sys --byfmt hitex.fmt 
	... long list of reports ...
	(hiplainpage.tex
	! Missing { inserted.
	<to be read again> 
			   p
	<to be read again> p
			    refer
	<to be read again> 
			   e
	l.48     prefere
			d 0
	? 
	! Emergency stop.
	<to be read again> 
			   p
	<to be read again> p
			    refer
	<to be read again> 
			   e
	l.48     prefere
			d 0
	Transcript written on hitex.log.

On another server, last updated two days ago, the hitex.fmt file built
without complaints.

Has anyone else seen a similar failure?

On the two servers, the timestamps and checksums of
the last-reported file agree:

	% ls -log /usr/uumath/texlive/2023/texmf-dist/tex/hitex/base/hiplainpage.tex
	-rw-r--r-- 1 2306 Mar  6  2022 /usr/uumath/texlive/2023/texmf-dist/tex/hitex/base/hiplainpage.tex

	% md5sum /usr/uumath/texlive/2023/texmf-dist/tex/hitex/base/hiplainpage.tex
	7f265bb2e20737e02e5999e78dc8c00b  /usr/uumath/texlive/2023/texmf-dist/tex/hitex/base/hiplainpage.tex

I'm now going to run a similar update on yet another server here that
has a standalone filesystem with TeX Live 2023 to see if I can
reproduce the problem.


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- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- University of Utah                                                          -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/ -
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