[2593] in SIPB bug reports
The hundred thousand dollar question: What made latex die suddenly?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Harrington)
Sun Mar 15 11:28:34 1992
Date: Sun, 15 Mar 92 06:27:56 -1000
From: jh@oobleck.ifa.hawaii.edu (Joe Harrington)
To: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU
Cc: jh@galileo.ifa.hawaii.edu, wisdom@poincare.mit.edu, amehta@MIT.EDU
Reply-To: jh@galileo.ifa.hawaii.edu
As of sometime Friday evening or Saturday morning, latex (both sipb
biglatex and athena latex) stopped working on our machine
(astron.mit.edu). It's a decstation running ultrix 4.2 that mounts
the afs-nfs translator and gets /usr/sipb and /usr/athena through it.
Both programs start running, but the version 2.93 biglatex gives:
/usr/sipb/decmipsbin/biglatex test
This is TeX, C Version 2.93 (no format preloaded)
(Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)
(Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)
...and produces no output files at all.
Version 3.00 latex produces:
This is TeX, C Version 3.0 (format=lplain 91.7.14) 15 MAR 1992 10:00
**&latex test
(test.tex
LaTeX Version 2.09 <4 Aug 1988>
Prepared for MIT Project Athena. (/usr/athena/lib/tex/macros/article.sty)
! Undefined control sequence.
\@floatplacement ...global \@toproom \topfraction
\@colht \global \@botnum \...
...
l.3 \begin{document}
? q
OK, entering \batchmode...
! Undefined control sequence.
\@floatplacement ...bal \@botroom \bottomfraction
\@colht \global \@colnum \...
...
l.3 \begin{document}
[this repeats for a LONG time, as each tiny thing is discovered not to
be defined]
The file test.tex is:
\documentstyle{article}
\begin{document}
Hello.
\end{document}
In my tests, TEXINPUTS was unset. I also tried it with my usual
.:/mit/jh/lib/tex:/usr/sipb/lib/tex/macros
and got the same results. No other TEX environment variables were
set.
Since SIPB shut off remote access to hodge and podge, I can't rlogin
to any machine that gets the decmips AFS packs to check if the same
binaries and such work on an Athena machine, but it works on our
Athena 7.3 vaxen (where, interestingly, there is a /usr/bin/X11/*tex).
I could not find any @sys entries in the paths to the programs or
files, and could read every byte of virtex, plain.tex, latex.tex, and
article.sty. The links we use are:
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root 54 Feb 1 03:22 /usr/athena -> /afs/athena.mit.edu/system/pmax_ul4/srvd.73/usr/athena
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root 9 Nov 23 01:31 /usr/sipb -> /mit/sipb
lrwxr-xr-x 1 jh 30 Nov 23 06:39 /mit/sipb -> /afs/sipb.mit.edu/project/sipb
Could someone run latex on hodge, podge, or some other Athena decmips,
and let me know if it succeeds? Could a TeXnician or TeXpert decode
the error message to see just what file it's barfing on? Does anyone
have any idea what changed between Friday and Saturday that could
cause this?
Of course, this was discovered by a professor writing a grant
application due Monday. We have changed nothing on our machine. I
know that doesn't mean the problem doesn't lie there. Any help will
be very much appreciated.
--jh--
