Re: Usual trouble - runbib says "error"

Hi Jeremy,

I'm really sorry to hear that this is "usual trouble" on your end. It shouldn't
be, and I'll try my best to fix this.

Jeremy Malcolm <[email protected]> was heard to say:

> runbib is aborting for me again with the unhelpful message "error", and
> I've gone through all the usual reasons why this always happens (eg.
> obviously missing fields in references I've added recently, stray colons
> in citation keys) to no avail.

You may have tried this already, but does the bug depend on a particular
citation? Does runbib finish ok if you remove one or some of the citations you
added most recently?

> When I run refdbd in debugging mode the
> last lines it shows as runbib spits out its error are:
>
> SELECT
>
thesis.t_author.author_name,thesis.t_author.author_lastname,thesis.t_author.author_firstname,thesis.t_author.author_middlename,thesis.t_author.author_suffix,thesis.t_xauthor.xauthor_role
> FROM thesis.t_author, thesis.t_xauthor WHERE
> thesis.t_author.author_id=thesis.t_xauthor.author_id AND
> thesis.t_xauthor.xauthor_type='primary' AND
> thesis.t_xauthor.refdb_id=416 ORDER BY t_xauthor.xauthor_position
> child finished client on fd 5
> child exited with code 1
> server waiting n_max_fd=4
>
> That same SELECT query appears a few times further up, in fact it almost
> seems to be stuck in a loop.

You may gain this impression because the bibliography code needs to access the
author names several times while formatting a bibliography entry - once for the
real bibliographic data, up to twice for the in-text citation if you use an
author/year style, and once for each multi-head citation if you use an
author/year style.

> There is nothing unusual about this record though, because I have lots
> of authors without firstnames, middlenames or suffixes, and neither is
> that from a reference that I added recently.
>
> What can I do to troubleshoot this further?
>

The easiest way to troubleshoot this is to modify refdbd to provide additional
debug information. refdbd does not seem to crash (otherwise the child would
return 0, not 1), so it is a matter of finding the call that returns an error
code and to step back from there. I'd like to reproduce this problem on my box.
Could you send me your reference database (as a RIS or risx file) or make it
available for download on some webspace? In addition to that I'll need the
basename.id.xml file that runbib creates. What platform are you running anyway?

regards,
Markus


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


-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security?
Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier
Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo
http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642