mptopdf output file not numbered.

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Mon Dec 16 00:45:17 CET 2019


Hi Andreas,

    I _guess_ the patch wants to avoid "unnecessary" rename operations 

That useless optimization has wasted a lot of people's time.
Can we please stop it now?

    bug in the _original_ version

I agree that the current ("standard") mptopdf does not support the
recommended outputtemplate, as you say:

   outputtemplate := "%j-%c.mps";
   ...
   MPtoPDF 1.4.1 : no filename matches example

Your newest version works with that particular case. So that's good.
Unfortunately (unrelated to outputtemplate), it can output to files
other than the actual root name, depending on what exists in the cwd:

echo 'beginfig(0); draw (0,0) -- (1,1); endfig; end.' >hello.mp
echo 'beginfig(0); draw (0,0) -- (1,1); endfig; end.' >hello2.mp
./mptopdf.pl hello2.mp # your mptopdf; runs ok
./mptopdf.pl hello.mp
..
MPtoPDF 1.4.1 : hello is converted to hello-0.pdf + hello2-0.pdf

I ran it on hello.mp, but it also made the (unrelated) hello2-0.pdf.
The original mptopdf does not do this.

I don't doubt that it's possible to make the original mptopdf fail too,
but I don't want to spend any more time testing things that I'm not
responsible for.  Anyway, clearly the original version does the job it
needs to do, since there were no complaints until it was
"improved". --best, karl.


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