[tex-live] bug report of bibtex

[John Collins]

On 5/7/18 5:52 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
>      You can directly run latexmk in the source folder
> 
> Like Akira, the standard sequence worked for me:
> 
> pdflatex --output-dir=output source.tex
> bibtex output/source
> pdflatex --output-dir=output source.tex
> pdflatex --output-dir=output source.tex
> 
> bibtex found ../Library.bib ok.
 >
 > I can only suggest reporting this to the latexmk maintainer.

Latexmk maintainer here.

For normal documents that sequence of commands does work. Unfortunately 
the bibtex run fails if the document uses \include.  Then  there are 
extra .aux files and output/source.aux inputs them, by commands like

     \@input{chapter1.aux}

When you invoke bibtex by

     bibtex output/source

it doesn't find the extra .aux files.

To work around this, latexmk effectively does the following

     sets BIBINPUTS and BSTINPUTS to include the current directory
     cd output
     bibtex source
     cd back to the original directory
     undo the setting of BIBINPUTS and BSTINPUTS

I didn't see any simpler way of handling this.  The solution has worked 
for me for a long time.

However, the solution fails if a .bib file is specified in a 
\bibliography command relative to the document directory; that is the 
OP's problem.

I don't see a general purpose solution other than to create appropriate 
symlinks in the output directory, which is (a) a fudge and (b) OS 
dependent as to whether it works.

What would be nice would be for bibtex to change its behavior to look 
for the other input files in the directory of the primary aux file.  But 
that's not what it does.  Is there some setting of bibtex that I am 
missing? Has someone a better idea?

John Collins