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

["Thomas S. Dye" <tsd@tsdye.com>]

On Oct 9, 2010, at 6:42 AM, Nick Dokos wrote:

> 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?
>>
>

Perhaps org-latex-to-pdf-process should just run pdflatex twice (or  
three times) so that it most likely will work out of the box.  IIUC,  
the user can set this variable to something else.  Some ready-to-use  
alternatives on Worg might be useful.  There, the pitfalls of using  
texi2dvi could be explained and those with systems where it works  
could find a recipe and make use of it.  The use of other latex make  
files might be illustrated there as well.

All the best,
Tom