multibib support in rubber is buggy

[JS]

Binary package hint: rubber

I have noticed the following problems in the "multibib" support in rubber (Ubuntu package rubber, version 1.0-1; some of these problems seem to be also present in the upstream version 1.1):

1) Write a Latex document foo.tex that uses multibib bibliographies. Even if everything works fine, "rubber -Wall foo.tex" and "rubber-info foo.tex" report a number of warnings, "Citation `xxx' undefined" for each multibib citation xxx. However, the dvi, ps, pdf etc. are perfect. Forcing a new run by "rubber -f -Wall foo.tex" fixes the problem.

2) Compile a document that uses multibib. Add "\newcites{x}{X}" in the source. Rubber dies with "IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'x.aux'". Cleaning all generated files helps.

3a) Add "\newcites{x}{X}" but do not add any \citex, \bibliographyx or such. Run "rubber -Wall foo.tex". It compiles foo.tex, tries to run bibtex x, and stops. The bibtex process fails and rubber aborts; however, no error message is printed to the user, not even with -Wall. Running rubber again generates dvi, ps, pdf, and whatever was requested, but all multibib bibliographies are missing. This is user's error, but rubber could tell it, instead of failing silently.

3b) Use \bibliographyx{foo} such that foo.bib is missing. Similar result as in the case 3a: bibtex fails, rubber aborts, but no error message is printed.

4) Rubber does not understand the syntax \newcites{x,y}{X,Y}; one has to write \newcites{x}{X}\newcites{y}{Y}. In the case of the former, rubber tries to read a file called "x,y.aux".

5) The option "bibtex.path" is not used in multibib bibliographies. Combined with 3b, the user experience is highly confusing.

[Lionel Le Folgoc (mrpouit)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. You reported this bug a while ago and there hasn't been any activity in it recently. We were wondering is this still an issue for you? Thanks in advance.

[Ryan Kavanagh (ryanakca)]

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!

[Reinhard Tartler (siretart)]

this is a perfectly valid and detailed report about issues in rubber that are still present in natty.

please don't close such perfectly fine bugreports prematurely

[rbertran (rbertran)]

The problems are still present in Ubuntu 12.04. Using rubber 1.1.
I'll try to figure out if there is a work-around.