Re: Karl Berry: Re: Nick Dokos: texi2dvi egrep regexp

[Nick Dokos <nicholas.dokos@hp.com>]

Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik@gmail.com> wrote:


> I am looking for a way out which will allow pdf compilation of Org
> work out of the box, and still allow texi2dvi to be used where possible.
> 
> I have so far come up with two possible work-arounds and would
> like to hear if one of them makes sense:
> 
> 1.  I could set the environment variable LC_ALL
>     for the duration of the texi2dvi command to some value
>     like C?  That should fix the egrep call, but could
>     it have adverse effects on the pdflatex and bibtex runs or
>     any other stuff used in texi2dvi?
> 

Yes, at least theoretically. I don't think anybody has gone down
the path of investigating these effects.

> 2. On startup, I could use
> 
>    (if (= 0 (shell-command "echo foo | egrep \"[A-z]\""))
>             ....
> 
> 
>    to check if there is a problem and in this case go for
>    manual pdflatex runs rather than using texi2dvi.  THis might work,
>    but it would be a bit unpredictable what ends up being used,
>    and with no setup in Org you could get different sets of commands
>    on different machines.
> 

The trouble with this is that you are checking on egrep which will give
you a positive for egrep versions >= 2.6.x, but the fix to texi2dvi might
have made that irrelevant. How about

     try
        texi2dvi
     except
        do Seb's thrice-repeated pdflatex (or whatever) call        

After everybody has updated to the latest texinfo, the exception code
can be taken out.

Alternatively, the texi2dvi method can be reverted: it was an idea that
was worth trying, but it has caused more harm than good at this point
- maybe it can be revisited in six months.

> Any ather ideas?  Comments?
> 

Nick