Last modified: 2008-11-26 02:33:05 UTC
For reasons that nobody seems to understand, quite a few images generated by texvc have come out as 0 byte files. Whenever I check one of these empty images, the server returns a last-modified date of Sunday Nov 9 for the image. Shell access is needed to investigate further. Requests: 1. Verify if all the empty math images were actually made on Nov 9. If so, this may have been some sort of transient bug. If empty images are still being created that's a bigger issue. 2. Delete all the 0 byte math images that currently exist, so they can be regenerated.
What might be handy is some way for end users to purge broken tecvc images on a page, so that we don't have to keep bugging developers about it. Perhaphs make the purge action do a forced rebuild of latex images.
I agree that might be handy, but it should be filed as a separate bug, since this one can be resolved without implementing any new code. The reason I didn't file that one is that I don't know about the performance implications.
Well, this may have resolved itself; these 0 byte images were both created Nov 18: http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/b/9/d/b9d99db8626de63193c7fe96273a6cae.png http://upload.wikimedia.org/math/9/c/2/9c2f3928aad1c22e5ab862eb4b905a8e.png
This problem has certainly NOT resolved itself and should be considered to be of the highest urgency. I've been editing Wikipedia mathematics articles for more than six years. I've never seen this until within the last couple of weeks or so (unless it was something ephemeral and trivial). Purging caches isn't working. Please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Mathematics#LaTeX_bug . This is urgent.
r43964 and r43965 should fix this; 0-byte images are now deleted, and newly rendered images should clear the old ones from the caches. Now to find why things are breaking... :P
