How to make arara work with bibtexu?

Question

I need to submit an article, so I have to follow journal's rules of using PdfLaTeX and BibTeX. And one of the records in bibliography is in Russian, so the only option for me is using bibtexu. If I run this chain one by one: pdflatex -> bibtexu -> pdflatex -> pdflatex all goes OK and I get a proper PDF file.

If now I add

% arara: pdflatex
% arara: bibtexu
% arara: pdflatex
% arara: pdflatex

at the beginning of tex file and then run arara file.tex I get <BibTeXu> ... FAILURE. Using TeXLive 2019 with latest updates as of today on Windows 7. If I remove that Russian record and change % arara: bibtexu to % arara: bibtex everything works just fine. Well, I can run commands by hand in this particular case, but is it possible to use nice automatization machinery of arara with bibtexu?

Answer 1

OK, I probably have solution. I searched the forum and found this discussion about how to ignore errors in commands during arara run. Actually, there are no real errors in the bibtexu run, it just issues warnings (I suppose this is because of the bst file I use) after each name and after each block:

This is BibTeXu: a UTF-8 Big BibTeX version 0.99d
Implementation:  Microsoft(R) C/C++ for Win32
Release version: 3.71 (04 mar 2019)
Compiled with:   ICU version 63.1

The top-level auxiliary file: file.aux
The style file: style.bst
Reallocated glb_str_ptr (elt_size=4) to 10 items from 0.
Reallocated global_strs (elt_size=20001) to 10 items from 0.
Reallocated glb_str_end (elt_size=4) to 10 items from 0.
Reallocated wiz_functions (elt_size=4) to 6000 items from 3000.
Database file #1: file.bib
Warning--Gardner S.
Warning--Haxton W.C.
Warning--Holstein B.R.
Warning--after block
Warning--Kistryn S.
Warning--Lang J.
Warning--Liechti J.
Warning--Maier T.
Warning--Muller R.
Warning--Nessi-Tedaldi F.
Warning--Simonius M.
Warning--Smyrski J.
Warning--Jaccard S.
Warning--Haeberli W.
Warning--Sromicki J.
Warning--after block
Warning--Нурушев С.Б.
Warning--Рунцо М.Ф.
Warning--Стриханов М.Н.
Warning--after block
...

Here's how much of BibTeX's memory you used:
 Cites:                10 out of 750
 Fields:              344 out of 5000
 Hash table:        99608 out of 100000
 Strings:            1200 out of 100000
 Free string pool:  12934 out of 65000
 Wizard functions:   4014 out of 6000
(There were 100 warnings)

So, no errors, bbl file is correct, but the exit code of bibtexu for some reasons is not zero. I followed advices of referenced topic and added exit: value > 0 to bibtexu.yaml:

!config
# Arara, the cool TeX automation tool
# Copyright (c) 2018, Paulo Roberto Massa Cereda 
# All rights reserved.
#
# This rule is part of arara.
identifier: bibtexu
name: BibTeXu
authors:
- Marco Daniel
- Paulo Cereda
commands:
- name: An 8-bit implementation of BibTeX 0.99 with a very large capacity
  command: >
    @{
        return getCommand('bibtexu', options, getBasename(file));
    }
  exit: value > 0
arguments:
- identifier: options
  flag: >
    @{
        if (isList(parameters.options)) {
            return parameters.options;
        }
        else {
            throwError('I was expecting a list of options.');
        }
    }

Well, maybe this is not true solution and only a dirty hack, but it works for me. Of course I have to check if the resulting bibliography is correct, all cites are correct, and they are!