Bug#320821: tetex-bin: Latex sometimes produces (useless) dvi files for broken tex files.
> You cannot stop this "document" from producing a dvi file, unless you
> change the bowels of the TeX language, which will probably not even
> happen if some day people in fact manage a complete rewrite of TeX, as
> is currently planned.
Ok, I can understand that. One strange thing I found after further
investigation is that both 'pdftex' and 'pdflatex' fail on the
previously mentioned TeX file, but that only pdflatex produces a
(broken) pdf file. If whatever stops pdftex from creating a pdf file in
this case could be implemented in pdflatex as well then at least part of
the problem will be solved.
> I am quite sure you can produce equally useless binaries with a
> compiler, if you put enough effort in writing carefully designed
> nonsense in the source code, and you wouldn't blame the compiler.
It's not that carefully crafted at all, I just removed all useless cruft
to pinpoint the problem. The document which created this problem had a
broken "\begn{document}", followed by pages of text with one \newline in
it. This produced the totally broken pdf file.
I saw that you also CC'd this reaction to the 'rubber' bug I filed. I
agree that the LaTeX part of the bug may be dubious, but rubber should
really detect that pdflatex exited with an error and remove the pdf
file.
Greetings,
Bas Kloet
P.S. Sorry about the bounced email, I cleaned up my system a bit to rigorously
and removed my mail sorter.
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