Switch from rerun.sh to latexmk

[michaelmhoffman]

The latexmk command that comes with TeX Live seems to fulfill the same purpose as rerun.sh and is robust to a lot more edge cases, and probably quite a bit more future-proof.

[michaelmhoffman]

For example, rerun.sh does not seem to rerun TeX enough times for the acronym package to work.

[jmarshall]

Various maintainers have been reluctant to use latexmk in the past, because they did not have it installed. It may well be time to revisit this… 🤷

Starting from an empty new/ directory, both rerun.sh and latexmk run latex the same number of times (namely 3) and produce the same acronym-related warnings on the final run:

LaTeX Warning: Hyper reference `acro:ASCII' on page 6 undefined on input line 374.
LaTeX Warning: Hyper reference `acro:ASCII' on page 6 undefined on input line 374.
LaTeX Warning: Hyper reference `acro:regex' on page 6 undefined on input line 377.
LaTeX Warning: Hyper reference `acro:regex' on page 6 undefined on input line 377.

Is this what you're seeing, or do you experience a scenario in which rerun.sh and latexmk produce different results?

I suspect those warnings are some unfortunate interplay between hyperrefs and acronym commands…

[michaelmhoffman]

After reverting commit c773dcf to restore the changepage package (in an incorrect attempt to get this working on the CircleCI system that doesn't have changepage), rerun.sh is now working for me. I don't know why it wasn't working before—it's probably either because I was using it correctly or something else.

Will figure out how to remove those warnings for #570.

I'd still suggest using latexmk for the reasons above but it might not be a blocker for #570.

[jkbonfield]

FYI latexmk seems to work for me, assuming I used it correctly. Is there a specific document which you need comparing?

[michaelmhoffman]

If you do this, you will also need to remove new/*.fls and new/*.fdb_latexmk as part of the mostlyclean target, as done in #570.

[jmarshall]

[Summarising the discussion in the File Formats meeting:]

Assuming there are no maintainers or contributors who still do not have access to latexmk, there is really no good reason not to be using it, as it's the standard well-known tool for this job.

So a good way forward would be to make the s/rerun.sh/latexmk/ change in Makefile, ignore and clean those additional files as recommended, but leave the rerun.sh script in place in the repo in case anyone needs to continue to use it.

[jkbonfield]

Can I suggest having the rerun.sh command line as a comment in the Makefile too, so we can trivially comment out latexmk and uncomment rerun.sh should we ever be in a situation of needing it. As time goes by we'll get more confident as to whether anyone still requires it.