[Scons-dev] LaTeX changes to env['PATH'] can break builds

[Gary Oberbrunner]

Someone at my work recently discovered that updating SCons to 2.2.0 breaks
his build.  The reason is it now puts /usr/local/bin in the PATH
 (env['PATH']) before /usr/bin (or sth similar).  He has a bad version of a
utility in /usr/local/bin, which now gets used instead of the right one.  I
was worried that this might happen.  He bisected to find the change that
did it, and I've included his analysis below.

There are several things we can do:
1. do nothing, that's just how it is now.
2. make the LaTeX stuff use absolute paths rather than relying on
env['PATH']
3. Somehow set PATH only for that tool, without mucking with the standard
PATH.

I don't like #2, it's ugly.  #1 is easiest, but since our goal is to make
reproducible builds, modifying the path globally is not ideal.  That leaves
us with #3.  I don't have any ideas off the top of my head for how to
handle that; does anyone?

Which leads me to toolchain revamp.  I'm going to write up a message about
this shortly; I think it should be one of our highest priority projects for
2013 (along with several others), and I'm willing to take it on.

-- Gary

======================

Yep, it was the TeX stuff:

The first bad revision is:
changeset:   2554:ac3619647c8e
user:        Robert Managan <managan1 at llnl.gov>
date:        Tue Sep 06 22:18:10 2011 +0000
summary:     Update path information for OSX.

Abbrieviated diff:

warp:scons bash$ hg diff -c 2554
diff -r 3612f1fa3760 -r ac3619647c8e src/CHANGES.txt
--- a/src/CHANGES.txt        Thu Sep 01 21:40:26 2011 +0000
+++ b/src/CHANGES.txt        Tue Sep 06 22:18:10 2011 +0000
@@ -185,6 +185,9 @@

     - Added support for the bibunits package so we call bibtex on all
       the bu*.aux files.
+
+    - Add support of finding path information on OSX for TeX applications
+      MacPorts and Fink paths need to be added by the user

-- 
Gary
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