PhD Thesis

This is a repository reflecting the current state of my PhD thesis and the project management surrounding completing the write-up.

Compilation

The thesis is being automatically built using travis-ci with the resulting files uploaded as a release on GitHub.

To compile yourself requires the installation of Miniconda which allows for all dependencies to be installed using

conda env create

followed by

conda activate thesis

to activate the environment containing the dependencies.

Note that to update the dependencies the command

conda env update

is required.

The build itself is completed with

make

which generates a file thesis.tex in the current directory.

Linting

In addition to the tools to build the thesis, I have a range of tools to identify poor writing. These tools are not all perfect, with a degree of false positives, and not entirely suited to academic writing, however they do make me look harder at certain aspects of what I write.

These tools require that nodejs is installed which is one of the dependencies installed using conda above. With the thesis conda environment activated running the command

npm install

will install all the packages required for these checks.

The command

make lint

will then run all the checks for the files.

These checks can also be configured to show up in your text editor, making it much easier to see and fix each of the issues which are highlighted.

Common Issues

If there is an error

biber: error while loading shared libraries: libcrypt.so.1:
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

installing libraries for backwards compatibility is required, for example on fedora 30

dnf install libxcrypt-compat

is required for biber 2.5 to run.

Another error is

biber: error while loading shared libraries: libnsl.so.1:
cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

which can be resolved by installing libnsl, a library that was previously part of glibc.

dnf install libnsl