[therion] Unhelpful metapost error

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 09:20:11AM +0200, Stacho Mudrak wrote:

>>> >therion: error -- metapost exit code -- 256
>
>>
>> This is strange, usually metapost writes something to log file. Do you
>> remember your wrong data arrangement?
>>
>> If you would like to see (in the future), where the problem is, you can
>> run therion with -d option. Than all temporary files will not be deleted
>> and in the {$TEMP}/thTMPDIR you will find therion metapost file data.mp.


OK, this problem hasn't gone away (we've just been using the box it
works on).  But looking at it again, if I run therion -d the output from
metapost is:

This is MetaPost, Version 0.641 (Web2C 7.4.5)
kpathsea: Running mktexfmt mpost.mem
fmtutil: format `mpost' not available.
I can't find the mem file `mpost.mem'!
therion: error -- metapost exit code -- 256

It turns out that the problem box is missing /var/lib/texmf/web2c/mpost.mem
while the other box has it.  Both boxes are running debian "unstable",
but that file isn't owned by any package (so I presume it is generated
by installing one of the tetex packages or something list that).

Digging deeper, the "good" box has tetex-extra installed, but the "bad"
box doesn't, and after installing this package, everything works.  But
the debian therion package depends on tetex-bin but not tetex-extra so
it's not automatically installed.

Wookey: I've not filed a Debian bug for this - let me know if you want
me to...

Cheers,
Olly

[therion] Unhelpful metapost error

[Olly Betts]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2004 at 06:38:52PM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:

>> When I try to process my survey to produce a PDF plan, metapost appears
>> to not like something, but there's no error message, so I've no idea
>> where to look.
>>
>> I've attached the log, I can send other stuff if that's helpful.
>>
>> This is therion 0.3.3 on Linux, with THUSESVX defined.


Hmm, well by rearranging what stuff was in which file I seem to have
stopped metapost complaining.  But the pdf file seems to ignore all
the scraps and I just get a lot of station markers with "arms".

I've not tried to join any scraps together yet, but it seems odd that
I don't get an error message if that's the problem.

I also tried without THUSESVX defined, but that doesn't make the scraps
appear.

Cheers,
Olly

P.S. I'll keep the dataset which made metapost around for a while in case
you want to investigate that.