Re: The state of my Debian RefDB/PHPweb confusion

Hi,

Doug du Boulay <[email protected]>:

>
> After some initial confusion on my part in creating the database (following
> the instructions in the tutorial "a day with the refdb clients"
> which made no mention of running the refdba command "createdb DBNAME"),


The tutorial was written for users who are placed in front of a running RefDB
system and who are expected to work with existing databases. The manual has
"Getting Started" sections as well which include the magic incantations to
create reference databases.

> (I did experiment with replacing  /lib/tls/libc.so.6 with a symlink
> to /lib/libc.so.6  and while the "mv" command still works, "ls" doesn't,
> the CPU started to overheat, the fan went a little berzerk and bib2ris and
> refdbc both still segfaulted - so don't try that at home folks).
>

I hope you managed to pull the plug in time.

> I downloaded the sources for both libdbi and libdbi-drivers 0.8.1
> Although libdbi seemed to build ok, trying to build the libdbi-sqlite driver
> was a nonevent because ./configure --with-sqlite fails with
> error: Invalid SQLite directory - include files not found
>  - presumably that is because I needed libsqlite0-dev  right?

This is correct. Debian strictly separates run-time libraries from the headers
and libraries required to build stuff. Whenever you build something yourself,
you most likely need -dev packages for a dozen of libraries.

> hint of libdbi-0.8.1.  So I gave up and manually scrounged around in
>
>  http://libdbi.sourceforge.net/debian/pool/l/
>
> there I found
>    libdbd-sqlite_0.8.1-1_i386.deb
>    libdbi0_0.8.1-1_i386.deb
>    libdbi0-dev_0.8.0-1_i386.deb
>
> The latter one had a 8.0!=8.1 version conflict so I ran
>    dpkg -force-depends -i  libdbi0-dev_0.8.0-1_i386.deb

Unfortunately I never got the hang of creating Debian repositories. I've always
uploaded what David sent me, but he got lost somehow, so there's no Debian
maintainer currently. This explains the broken state of the repositories.

>
> Then I could build and install refdb-0.9.7-pre1  along with
> RefDB-perlmod-0.4 and RefDBClient-Client-1.13
> (a README to the effect of running "perl Makefile.PL" ; make ; make install
> could have been useful info for the latter two),

This was suggested before. It is my fault that the READMEs are still missing.

> In my subsequent limited testing, it seems that refdbc had some trouble
> producing debugging info and writing it to the log file. Maybe it was because
> of restrictive file permissions? I dunno.

I'm pretty sure this is the reason. You start refdbc as a regular user, but on
most systems only root has sufficient permissions to create files in /var/log.
Either use your own log files, e.g. in ~/var/log, or create the files as root
and change the permissions appropriately.

> Also both refdbc and refdba produce log file info with time stamps that seem
> to be standard GMT rather than local timezone.

This does make sense in a distributed environment. You could start refdbc and
connect to a refdbd instance running in a different timezone.

> Another logged bogus search command was from the refdbkajquery.html form
>    getau refs :AU:=Wang,J.P.
> where the database "refs" is prepended to the command. Actually
> that database is populated with the refdb/examples/testrefs.ris data.
> Presumably missing a leading "-d" before the database name?

I assume you followed the instructions in the phpweb subdirectory? I also had a
hard time setting up the web interface, but I hoped the instructions contain
the essential tricks.

> A different problem arose with the commandline interface for
> refdbc where I can't seem to get wildcard/regular expression searches
> to work e.g.
> getref :AU:~Wang,J.P. works, but
> getref :AU:~Wang*  does not
> getref :AU:~"Wang*"  doesn't
> getref :AU:~"^Wang*" doesn't
>
> Is there something wrong with my syntax,
> a configuration error, or a bug?

The syntax is wrong. If you use PostgreSQL or MySQL as your backend, then you
have to use Unix regular expressions. The expressions above would find Wang,
Wangg, and Wanggggggggggggg, but this is not what you mean. Searching for
"Wang.*" (i.e. Wang, followed by zero or more arbitrary characters) should give
better results.

>
> The only other problem was that the refdb configure script apparently doesn't
> like my debian libbtparse0 library
> ii  libbtparse0        0.34-1             A C library to parse BibTeX files
> -rw-r--r--  1 root root   65808 Jun 18  2004 /usr/lib/libbtparse.so.0.0.0
> > checking for bt_initialize in -lbtparse... no
> > libbtparse not found; bib2ris import filter will not be built
>
Most likely you lack a libbtparse-dev package, see above.

>
> Thats about it, I think.

Well, that was enough for a single mail, I reckon :-)

regards
Markus

-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de



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