automating documentation builds

[Martha J Davidson]

Hi everyone,

I'm in the process of automating the doc build process, creating both help 
(using WebWorks AutoMap) and PDFs. I'm using FM 7.2 and WWP2003, version 
8.6, along with some custom FrameScripts written for my company by Rick 
Quatro. This runs on WinXP Pro, fully patched, with 1GB of memory.

I'm doing only the simplest commands, as far as I can tell: using a Windows 
batch file to check source files out of CVS to a brand-new directory, 
running a FrameScript to set conditional text properly for each of the 
chapters in a book file that includes chapters from each of my other books, 
and then calling WebWorks using the wpuba command-line interface from 
AutoMap. These commands are about the first third of my script.

Each command works fine by itself. When I run this portion of the script 
sequentially, FM crashes (with a dialog box listing error codes and the 
suggestion to read the log file for more information). I'm trying to figure 
out what's causing the crash. Initially, it happened partway through the 
FrameScript, running with RunEslBatch. When I saw that it happened on the 
same files consistently, I opened each of those files, re-saved them and 
checked them back into CVS. Now the crash happens about 70% of the way 
through the WebWorks help generation.

My first thought was that it was somehow related to memory--either a memory 
leak in FM or flaky memory on the build server hardware. And I don't know 
yet if either of these is the culprit or if something else is happening.

I realize this might not be enough to go on. Does anyone have any ideas? 
Thoughts of things to try? Similar experiences? I appreciate any help that 
anyone can offer.

martha
--
Martha Jane {Kolman | Davidson}
Dances With Words
editrix at nemasys.com

"Too many words bring about exhaustion."
      --Tao Te Ching, Chapter 5 (translated by Sheets/Tovey)