[tex-live] Bug in TexLive 2005 and 2007? Non-writable aux-file

[Reinhard Kotucha]

>>>>> "Philip" == Philip & Le Khanh <Philip-and-LeKhanh at Royal-Tunbridge-Wells.Org> writes:

  > Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

  >> Yes, the current behavior bothers me all the time.  I think that
  >> when people press CTRL-C or CTRL-D they expect that TeX aborts
  >> immediately.  I also do not understand why TeX continues after a
  >> fatal error (file not writable) occurred.

  > I don't think such an error /is/ fatal, if TeX is operating in
  > interactive mode; in batch mode, on the other hand, it clearly
  > should be.  Why not in interactive mode ?  Because PdfTeX
  > regularly has problems writing to its PDF file if the latter is
  > open in Acrobat, and the user needs to be told of the problem,
  > close the Acrobat window, and then (ideally) just hit <Return> to
  > signal "try again, please".  Unfortunately PdfTeX doesn't treat
  > <Return> as "try again, please", so one is forced to enter the
  > full PDF file name.  It would be better (IMHO) if <Return>
  > signalled "I think I've fixed it; try again, please".

Ok, I agree with you that it is not really fatal if a file is not
writable in interactive mode.  It seems that the main problem is that
CTRL-C does not kill the process immediately.  I think it should.  And
what bothers me is that currently there is no reasonable way to kill
tex conveniently. 

Well, you don't have to say "CTRL-C" and "x" to break your input
file.  It is sufficient to press "RETURN".  All the extension magic is
completely crappy.  I think that it was DEK's worst decision.  And it
obviously had bitten him already:

 > From: Maggie McLoughlin <mam at Theory.Stanford.EDU>
 > Sender: owner-tex-k at tug.org
 > To: tex-k at tug.org
 > Subject: note from Don Knuth
 > Date: Sun, 7 May 2000 00:02:47 -0700 (PDT)
 > 
 > Dear TeXK-ers,
 > [...]
 > Node File lookup:  Please forgive me for asking a stupid question:
 > Suppose files foo.bar and foo.bar.tex both exist. Why is it so great
 > to latch onto 'foo.bar.tex' when the user asks for 'foo.bar'? You
 > speak of this as if it were an advantage, but in fact you have made
 > it impossible for the user to access 'foo.bar'. (She has to rename
 > 'foo.bar.tex' temporarily and unrename it again later.) This is definitely
 > a bug, imho; indeed, I corrected it years ago in my system at home,
 > when I realized that my file-listing program list.tex could not
 > list certain files. Section 511 of TeX: The Program says "The extension
 > of an input file or a write file is assumed to be `.tex' unless otherwise
 > specified." I don't believe you are compliant with this.

Regarding Acrobat, this is clearly a Windows issue.  The only thing
Adobe could do is to read the file into memory completely and then
close the file.  But this would be disastrous when files are large.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha			              Phone: +49-511-4592165
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