Last fall, about two weeks before I was to hand in a large project with
my project group. rubber, a tool which in some ways resemble make,
but for LaTeX files got broken due to a new version of teTeX. Fair
enough, it was unstable.
Curiously enough, pdflatex is broken for me again this fall. It runs fine, at least once, but generates a zero-byte .aux file. In addition, the PDF is around 16k instead of around 250k. In addition, the PDF file is invalid.
My workstation, which runs Ubuntu (warty) is fine, so is woody. Tracking down all the differences between woody and sid or warty and hoary is a fair amount of work, so I rather try to find out what goes wrong than do a full binary search.
After a bit of tracking, I found out libpng 1.2.7 is broken if you have alpha channels. If you don’t have alpha channels, it’s supposed to be fine (but I can’t test that – my images are exported automatically from dia and inkscape). Hope this is fixed before sarge releases..