Dropbox throws Rubber into an infinite loop

[Benjamin Esham]

[This bug was reported at http://osdir.com/ml/debian-bugs-dist/2011-01/msg02144.html, but does not seem to be present in the Rubber bug tracker anywhere. I experience the same problem on Mac OS X 10.6.7.]

When I run rubber on a directory that is watched by dropbox (downloaded package
from http://forums.dropbox.com/topic.php?id=17410 - filing a bug against that
too) it goes into an infinite loop while compiling latex. I believe this is
because the dropbox daemon, watching of the files changes them in some way that
rubber detects and responds to.

Running rubber with increased verbosity shows that the message "dependencies
were modified" appear for every latex run it does. Also, moving the files to
another directory and running rubber again shows no problem at all.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 5.0.7
APT prefers proposed-updates
APT policy: (500, 'proposed-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 2.6.26-2-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash