[l2h] redhat 7

[Bruce R Miller]

Ross Moore wrote:
> 
> > I am having a problem getting latex2html to work under redhat 7.  Does
> > anyone know about this problem (preferably with a solution).  It seems
> > like a problem with the new version of perl that comes with rh7.  It
> > installations without error but I get perl error messages when I try to
> > apply it to a latex file.
> 
> Please provide an example of the output log, including the messages
> that you get, and perhaps also a link to the LaTeX source.
> 
> Are you using the latest version of LaTeX2HTML ?
>  v99.2beta or v2K... developer versions ?
> If not, then you would encounter syntax errors with recent Perls,
> as they are more strict on some things, to allow threading to work.

I'll bet he's bumping against the infamous "Null db key" problem.
For some reason redhat ignores or disables the check of whether
a null key to a db is possible; For some reason Perl thinks this 
should be possible (seems to encourage sloppiness to me, but....)

Random redhat distributions seem to connect perl to a db that does not
support the null key; I noticed that redhat 7 has this problem.
I've had to help collegues using alpha machines through the same hurdle
in the past.

Although it's redhat's bug, not l2h's, in view of how mysterious the
error is and how annoying it is to `fix' from the installation side,
wouldn't it be worthwhile to avoid doing it in l2h?

What's happening is typically l2h is assigning to a hash that's tied to
a db.  All you've got to do is modify things like:
   $stuff{$key} = $value;
to
   $stuff{$key} = $value if $key;
(the only hard part is finding them all!)

--
bruce.miller@nist.gov
http://math.nist.gov/~BMiller/