[Axiom-developer] PRECIOUS and Rosetta

[Waldek Hebisch]

I wrote that there are three problem latexing build improvement
but in fact there are more.  Namely, Makefile mark .dvi files
as .PRECIOUS so that even if Latex fails, garbled .dvi lies on
disk and is used (skipping Latex run) on the next make run.
This can easily hide errors: it seems that I re-run make twice
and it skipped over an error.

I think that in general we should remove most .PRECIOUS rules
fom Makefile: when we get error generating a file we _want_ the
file to be re-made on the next run (after all, we want to fix
the problem and check our solution).

The Latex error is that noweb garbles Rosetta.pamphlet and Latex
fails.  I reported this prevoisly and Bill Page proviede a patch:

http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2006-10/msg00450.html

The patch I got is probably garbled by mail (in repo '\\' combination
appears at the end of lines, while in the patch it is at begining next
line), but otherwise it looks good.  I understand that it is still
hot topic but we should do something: apply the patch, skip noweb
run on plain tex or add noweb filter to protect [[ combination
(or maybe something else).

-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch
address@hidden