[tex-live] bug report of bibtex

[John Collins]

On 5/11/18 7:12 PM, Karl Berry wrote:
> 
 > John Collins wrote:
>      What would be nice would be for bibtex to change its behavior to look
>      for the other input files in the directory of the primary aux file.
> 
> Sounds plausible to me for bibtex to look for the aux files in the
> directory of the main aux file. For compatibility, probably do this
> after looking up the name as-is, although in practice I doubt that
> it would matter.
> 
> Since bibtex uses no path for looking up aux files, I see no way to get
> it to look in the --output-directory now for the subsidiary .aux's. I
> can't think of any other approach you're missing, unfortunately.

By the way, I've just realized that a solution can be made if bibtex8 is 
used instead of bibtex, since bibtex8 uses the TEXINPUTS path for its 
.aux file search.

Would a change in bibtex be possible the following lines?  (I don't know 
all the ramifications, and I don't know whether this is a TeXLive 
responsibility, of course.)

Suppose the top-level .aux file (specified on the command line) has a 
non-trivial path component, e.g., one runs
    bibtex output/main
or
    bibtex output/main.aux

Then the search for subsidiary .aux files is changed from no path to 
just the path component of the top-level aux file.  (Or to that path 
component and the current directory.)

If that could be done, then it would also be useful to add that path 
component to the search path for .bib files.  This is because there is 
at least one widely used documentclass (specifically revtex4-1) that 
generates a .bib file.  This is used for incorporating footnotes in the 
bibliography list.  The generated .bib file is written to the output 
directory.

John