Subject: Re: bug#8099: LaTeX and automake

From: Ralf Wildenhues <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 27 Feb 2011 15:42:23 +0100

* Reuben Thomas wrote on Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 02:39:31PM CET:
> On 27 February 2011 06:53, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > Anyway, the next step to pursue this would be to think hard about the
> > desired semantics,
> 
> The tricky part here is that latexmk does its own dependency finding.

Well yes.  Also, as you already mentioned, latex semantics don't really
fit a directed graph where the nodes are files; rather, it needs a more
complex diagram of states of sets of files.  I don't think trying to map
that to portable make would be a worthwhile endeavor, given that latexmk
already exists.  I think we should just try to find rules that are safe
in the sense of: they call out to latexmk when needed, and not too often
when it is not needed.

> Hence, in my example rules I only list the root file for each
> document.

Right.  But that will fail to do TRT when you then go and edit another
file which becomes part of the document.

> I suppose that what one would want is something like the makedepends
> support one gets from a C compiler, so that the dependencies could be
> extracted by automake and included in the makefile automatically?

That could be an improvement.  Or, as a first step, just calling latexmk
every time.  Does it do anything if files are up to date?

Do you happen to know if latexmk works with pgfplots?

Thanks,
Ralf