[therion] Unhelpful metapost error

Olly Betts olly at survex.com
Thu Oct 14 05:27:51 CEST 2004


On Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 09:20:11AM +0200, Stacho Mudrak wrote:

>>> >therion: error -- metapost exit code -- 256
>
>>
>> This is strange, usually metapost writes something to log file. Do you
>> remember your wrong data arrangement?
>>
>> If you would like to see (in the future), where the problem is, you can
>> run therion with -d option. Than all temporary files will not be deleted
>> and in the {$TEMP}/thTMPDIR you will find therion metapost file data.mp.


OK, this problem hasn't gone away (we've just been using the box it
works on).  But looking at it again, if I run therion -d the output from
metapost is:

    This is MetaPost, Version 0.641 (Web2C 7.4.5)
    kpathsea: Running mktexfmt mpost.mem
    fmtutil: format `mpost' not available.
    I can't find the mem file `mpost.mem'!
    therion: error -- metapost exit code -- 256

It turns out that the problem box is missing /var/lib/texmf/web2c/mpost.mem
while the other box has it.  Both boxes are running debian "unstable",
but that file isn't owned by any package (so I presume it is generated
by installing one of the tetex packages or something list that).

Digging deeper, the "good" box has tetex-extra installed, but the "bad"
box doesn't, and after installing this package, everything works.  But
the debian therion package depends on tetex-bin but not tetex-extra so
it's not automatically installed.

Wookey: I've not filed a Debian bug for this - let me know if you want
me to...

Cheers,
    Olly





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