Hi,
I wasted a whole afternoon figuring out why a job that runs ok on many
opensuse machines fails on a machine that runs a debian alpha
distribution (customer demand). I already had to fix all kind of startup
scripts due to the fact that sh(ell scripts) are run with dash which is
incompatible so maybe I should have be more suspicious towards the os
instead of trying to fix the tex end.
Anyhow, one thing I noticed is that setuptex doesn't seem to work ok
i.e. there is something wrong with determining $OWNPATH which makes the
initialization fail. Maybe some volunteer can figure that out (there are
some catches for other shells in the script too so adding yet another
doesn't hurt).
But, the biggest surprise (if I got it right) is that in some of the
scripts that I use and run from within context, the to be produced
results sometimes were there and sometimes not. This got obscured by the
fact that in a second run the content actually was there (it has to be
fetched from a remote database) but that code like "page \pagenumber\ of
\lastpage" failed to report the right last page which in fact was a side
effect of the first run not using content. Okay, it got somewhat more
obscured by the fact that I used --runs=2
Accidentally, by adding more tracing code, I figured out is that I pipe
the messages to a log file using &> which is pretty valid in bash but
not so in dash where the & puts the job in the background and thereby
let the tex run carry on without waiting. So, it looks like we need to
use >filename 2>&1 instead of &>filename.
I checked the scripts in the context tree and so far found no occurences
but first-setup.sh has two &>'s in it that might need fixing.
Hans
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Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE
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