[7663] in SIPB bug reports
'latex2e' wrapper won't work on i386_linux[12]
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Z Maze)
Sun Oct 29 22:44:23 2000
To: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU
Cc: "Emily M. Marcus" <emarcus@MIT.EDU>
From: David Z Maze <dmaze@MIT.EDU>
Date: 29 Oct 2000 22:43:49 -0500
Message-ID: <y6866mboux6.fsf@indiana.mit.edu>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
/mit/sipb/arch/i386_linux2 is a symlink to /mit/sipb/machtype/linux,
which in turn appears to want to contain a.out binaries that will work
with old Slackware/Athena and SIPB Red Hat/Athena 4.x and 5.2 boxen.
None of these machines are based on an Athena release newer than 8.2.
/mit/sipb/machtype/linux/latex2e is a Bourne shell script that looks
like it's intended to run a proper LaTeX2e on machines where the
Athena version of LaTeX is 2.09 and a working LaTeX2e environment
isn't guaranteed to exist. In the absence of /usr/athena/bin/pdftex
(which IIRC appeared in 8.4), the wrapper script runs
/bin/athena/attachandrun to get latex2e out of the newtex locker.
Problem is, attachandrun appeared relatively recently (8.2), so
sufficiently old versions of Red Hat/Athena won't be able to run the
wrapper. This cripples anybody who tries to explicitly run latex2e on
an older machine.
If support is going to be maintained for i386_linux[12], the latex2e
script should manually attach newtex and run latex2e from the locker
directly, without the help of attachandrun which might not exist.
--
David Maze dmaze@mit.edu http://www.mit.edu/~dmaze/
"Theoretical politics is interesting. Politicking should be illegal."
-- Abra Mitchell
