Rubber 1.2 (wily) crashes when bibtex is involved

[Bram Geron]

Basic LaTeX files fail to compile when BibTeX is involved. For example, this .tex file compiles fine in Rubber 1.4 for me:

    \documentclass{article}
    \begin{document}
    test
    \cite{test}
    \bibliographystyle{plain}
    \bibliography{bib}
    \end{document}

I can reproduce this on a fairly clean Docker VM:

    $ lsb_release -rd
    Description: Ubuntu 15.10
    Release: 15.10
    $ apt-cache policy rubber
    rubber:
      Installed: 1.2-1
      Candidate: 1.2-1
      Version table:
     *** 1.2-1 0
            500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ wily/universe amd64 Packages
            100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
    $ cat test.tex
    \documentclass{article}
    \begin{document}
    test
    \cite{test}
    \bibliographystyle{plain}
    \bibliography{bib}
    \end{document}
    $ touch bib.bib
    $ rubber test
    compiling test.tex...
    running BibTeX on test...
    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File "/usr/bin/rubber", line 4, in <module>
        sys.exit(Main()(sys.argv[1:]))
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rubber/cmdline.py", line 331, in __call__
        return self.main(cmdline)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rubber/cmdline.py", line 295, in main
        ret = env.final.make(self.force)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rubber/depend.py", line 166, in make
        ok = self.run()
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rubber/converters/latex.py", line 1310, in run
        if not self.post_compile():
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rubber/converters/latex.py", line 1261, in post_compile
        if not mod.post_compile():
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rubber/converters/latex.py", line 1526, in post_compile
        return self.pymodule.post_compile()
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rubber/latex_modules/bibtex.py", line 421, in post_compile
        return biblio.post_compile()
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rubber/latex_modules/bibtex.py", line 235, in post_compile
        return self.run()
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rubber/latex_modules/bibtex.py", line 258, in run
        if self.doc.env.execute(['bibtex', basename], doc, pwd=workdir):
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/rubber/environment.py", line 226, in execute
        stderr = stderr)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 710, in __init__
        errread, errwrite)
      File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1335, in _execute_child
        raise child_exception
    OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: ''

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Favio D'Ercole (fndercole)]

I can avoid this bug installing rubber 1.1 from vivid and marking as hold to prevent ugrading.

[Sam (puuska)]

The bug is caused by bibtex.py -script, which fails to get workdir with os.path.dirname().
A temporary fix is to remove pwd=workdir -parameter from line 258, and only execute rubber inside the tex folder.