[tex4ht] erorr code 256, possible perl error code, come up with using --lua option with make4ht, error --- Improper dvi file

[Karl Berry]

Hi Nasser,

    The KERNEL.tex, nma.cfg and main.mk4 are in same place:
    http://12000.org/tmp/103115/
    make4ht -u --lua -c ./nma.cfg -e ./main.mk4 KERNEL.tex "htm,3,pic-align,notoc*" -d KERNEL

Thanks for all your efforts on this.  (By the way, I get 403 forbidden
trying to get the files with wget, which is a bit annoying and doesn't
seem like it can provide much actual benefit, since the browser id
string is trivially changeable.)

Anyway, I can report that I get the same bad DVI file ("byte 208300 is
not post") rerunning your make4ht command with current TL.

So, it appears a bad DVI file is being created by dviluatex.  That
should never happen and thus is something we should report to them.
However, we have to be able to provide input that they can run directly
with the engine binary, not using make4ht.

Copying the dvilualatex command from the make4ht output and running it
by hand results in a perfectly fine .dvi file.  So something more is
happening in between runs, probably generation of intermediate files,
but I don't see any obvious way to determine what's needed to reproduce.

Also, it could be helpful for make4ht to run dvitype on any .dvi file
right after it is created, so that the error can be caught as soon as
possible in the process.

Also, I think it would be helpful to add a -recorder option to make4ht,
since what we really want to do is bundle up all the input files to give
to the luatex developers, along with the command line to reproduce that
problem.  And the recorder file is what would tell us for sure what
input files are needed.

I suppose it could all be figured out from strace output, but it would
be much simpler to get it from make4ht.

So, Michal ... wdyt?  Can you add stuff to help debug this to make4ht?

(BTW, it would also be conventional to actually recognize --help and
--version, and send their output to stdout instead of stderr, and exit
successfully.  Anyway ...)

Thanks,
Karl