Most latex helper binaries like bibtex and makeindex now require relative paths

[Johan Jernlås]

A simple flag for latex to use relative paths as arguments for helper binaries, or an update to the modules specified would suffice to fix this problem.

Included part of "latex --version"

pdfTeX 3.1415926-1.40.11-2.2 (TeX Live 2010)
kpathsea version 6.0.0
Compiled with libpng 1.4.3; using libpng 1.4.5
Compiled with zlib 1.2.3; using zlib 1.2.5
Compiled with poppler version 0.14.4

[Paul Natsuo Kishimoto (khaeru)]

Johan — Emmanuel recently committed a change to the source to avoid absolute paths in BibTeX:

http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~rubber-devs/rubber/main/revision/412

…can you please check if this solves the problem (e.g. by installing the daily build of rubber from the PPA), or else provide a minimal example of a .tex file that will not compile when this bug is present?

[Johan Jernlås (spam-jernlas)]

I got rev 413, compiled and installed fine, but will not run:

$ rubber
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/rubber", line 3, in <module>
    from rubber.cmdline import Main
ImportError: No module named rubber.cmdline

I'm not very familiar with python, could there be some env. variable I need to set?

[Johan Jernlås (spam-jernlas)]

Okay, I've given it some more work.

First, it seems that something is failing on install after all, it says:
"package init file 'src/__init__.py' not found (or not a regular file)". This is not surprising as the file was renamed to Environment.py a couple of revisions ago. Is it supposed to be there?

Anyway, it seems that the new files were colliding with some old ones, so i'm calling them directly in the compile-dir now. The bug remains. I have constructed files that induce this behaviour, below is also a log when trying to run rubber on them. I coud only attach one file, so the .bib goes here: (and yes, they work just fine with latex and bibtex compiled manually)

bibloi.bib:
----------------------------------cut------------------------------
@Article{a,
  author = {A. Author},
  title = {Title},
  journal = {Journal},
  year = {1999},
  volume = {5}
}
----------------------------------cut------------------------------

 ~/tmp/rubber/rubber -dvv example.tex
This is Rubber version 1.1.
built-in module pdftex registered
parsing /home/jernlas/src/latex/test/example.tex
built-in module bibtex registered
dependencies: ['/home/jernlas/src/latex/test/example.tex', '/home/jernlas/src/latex/test/biblio.bib']
checking if compiling is necessary...
building additional files...
compiling example.tex...
executing: pdflatex \nonstopmode \input{example.tex}
  with environment: {'TEXINPUTS': '.:.:'}
process 12781 (pdflatex) returned 0
running post-compilation scripts...
[bibtex] checking if BibTeX must be run...
[bibtex] no BibTeX log file
running BibTeX on example...
There were errors making the bibliography.
There were errors compiling example.tex.

[Johan Jernlås (spam-jernlas)]

Sorry, file should be should be biblio.bib, not bibloi.bib.

[Ryan Turner (rjturner)]

I think a relative flag misses the point. Is there any reason to maintain the absolute path on calls to bibtex (or makeindex)?

I have flagged as duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/rubber/+bug/892315 (which has some workarounds).