Re: texi2dvi error on -recoder and \openout

[Gavin Smith]

On Thu, Sep 20, 2018 at 05:48:19PM +0200, Mohammad Akhlaghi wrote:
> make[1]: Entering directory '/home/myid/work/tmp/gnuastro-0.7/doc'
> TEXINPUTS="../bootstrapped/build-aux:$TEXINPUTS" \
> MAKEINFO='/bin/bash
> /home/myid/work/tmp/gnuastro-0.7/bootstrapped/build-aux/missing makeinfo -I
> ../bootstrapped/doc -I .  -I .' \
> texi2dvi -I ../bootstrapped/doc -I . --pdf --batch --build-dir=gnuastro.t2p
> -o gnuastro.pdf  \
> gnuastro.texi
> /usr/bin/texi2dvi: TeX neither supports -recorder nor outputs \openout lines
> in its log file
> make[1]: *** [Makefile:1750: gnuastro.pdf] Error 1
> make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/myid/work/tmp/gnuastro-0.7/doc'
> make: *** [Makefile:1833: pdf-recursive] Error 1
> 
> 
> Texi2dvi is from Texinfo version 6.5 (2017).
> 
> This problem can be reproduced with the Gnuastro tarball:
> http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.7.tar.gz
> But I also tried it on GAWK's tarball (which has fewer dependencies and is
> easier to check/reproduce), and the problem comes up there too:
> http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gawk/gawk-4.2.1.tar.gz
> 
> I build PDF manuals regularly, the only related thing that might have
> affected this is that I ran `tlmgr update --all' recently and something
> related to DVI was updated. But I don't know how to get the history of
> installed packages with `tlmgr' to check what it was. If it is relevant,
> could you please give me the necessary command to check?

I don't know anything about tlmgr, I'm afraid.  All I can suggest doing 
is running "pdfetex gawk.texi" and seeing if the output gives any 
clues.  If that runs fine, the problem would be with texidvi -- perhaps 
look at the output of texi2dvi --debug.

Maybe the error message is misleading -- if there is no working TeX 
program, texi2dvi should just say so instead of talking about -recorder 
etc. which few people will have a clue about.