[tex-live] cite package broken?

[George N. White III]

On Wed, Apr 22, 2009 at 6:46 AM, Ralph Martin
<Ralph.Martin at cs.cardiff.ac.uk> wrote:

> I am trying to prepare several papers for a conference, and part of the
> standard header given it says
> \usepackage{cite}
>
> With this line in, all the citations come out as blanks - but they work fine
> on a colleague's machine from the exact same LaTeX sources.

minimal example?  Are you using something similar to Proceedings of the SPIE:

<http://public.lanl.gov/kmh/spie/>

That site has a sample MS, which loads cite.sty:

(/usr/local/texlive/2008/texmf-dist/tex/latex/cite/cite.sty
LaTeX Info: Redefining \cite on input line 233.
LaTeX Info: Redefining \nocite on input line 304.
Package: cite 2009/03/20  v 5.0x
LaTeX Info: Redefining \cite on input line 370.
)

The sample formats correctly on my MacOSX TL2008 system.

> My cite.sty file has version 5.0 and a date of March 09, and so was
> presumably updated by a tlmgr update-all I did.
>
> Is it possible that this update is broken?
>
> For what it's worth, I'm using a Mac, and my colleague is using a PC.

We have both.  When a document works differently on different
machines, it is almost always due to loading different files, which
may be related in name only.

> Also, if anyone can give me suggestions how to get it going again, so I can
> carry on working, I'd be grateful! Simply putting an older cite.sty in the
> source directory did not do the trick.

Try following the advice in
<http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=filesused>:
Use \llistfiles to compare the versions of files used on the PC and your Mac.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia