[R] A glitch (???) in tools::texi2pf.

[Eric Berger]

As Achim wrote in point (2), Makefile is your friend.


On Sat, Aug 28, 2021 at 12:39 PM Rolf Turner <r.turner using auckland.ac.nz>
wrote:

>
> On Sat, 28 Aug 2021 09:47:03 +0200
> Achim Zeileis <Achim.Zeileis using uibk.ac.at> wrote:
>
> > On Sat, 28 Aug 2021, Rolf Turner wrote:
> >
> > > I have found that tools::texi2pf() ignores changes to the *.bib file
> > > unless the *.bbl file is removed prior to re-running
> > > tools::texi2pdf().
> >
> > This is how texi2pdf (or actually texi2dvi) from texinfo behaves.
> > This is likely what tools::texi2pdf calles in your setup anyway. In
> > short, texi2dvi considers the .bbl as input files to the .tex and
> > does not remove them if they are available prior to calling texi2dvi.
> >
> > Alternatives:
> >
> > (1) You can always re-run everything. Then simply start with a clean
> > directory and always use tools::texi2pdf(..., clean = TRUE). This
> > cleans up all the files it has produced (except the .pdf). But it
> > will preserve files left in the directory from previous runs.
> >
> > (2) You can detect upstream changes, e.g., based on timestamps etc.
> > Then the traditional approach would be to use a Makefile.
> >
> > Best,
> > Z
>
> Thanks.  I guess you're saying that it's a feature, not a bug. :-)
>
> Well it's a feature that I intensely dislike, but that cuts no ice I'm
> sure, and I'll just have to cope with it. I can easily build a local
> function that will remove *.bbl before invoking tools::texi2pdf(),
> and use that, rather than calling tools::texi2pdf() directly.
>
> However I *really* believe that this is a bad feature, and is a Trap
> For Young Players.  Hardly anyone knows what a *.bbl is or is for.
> Users would expect that changing the *.bib file would change the
> reference list in the output.  (I.e. that texi2pdf() would re-run
> bibtex "under the bonnet", as the user would do if processing from the
> OS command line rather than applying texi2pdf() from R.)
>
> I wonder how many papers in the R Journal have errors in their
> reference lists due to the fact that authors corrected the *.bib file,
> reprocessed using texi2pdf() and did not notice that the error they
> corrected had *not* been corrected in the *.pdf output?
>
> cheers,
>
> Rolf
>
> --
> Honorary Research Fellow
> Department of Statistics
> University of Auckland
> Phone: +64-9-373-7599 ext. 88276
>
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