Bug#396835: tetex-bin postinst take unlimited amount of time and ram (kpsewhich took 600M and 14h)

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Marcin Juszkiewicz <debbugs@hrw.one.pl> wrote:

> ps afx output taken when it was not stopped (cut to related things):
>
> 13780 ?        Ss     0:01 kdeinit Running...
> 13836 ?        S      3:46  \_ konsole [kdeinit]
> 13838 pts/1    Ss     0:00  |   \_ /bin/bash
> 30006 pts/11   S      0:00  |   |   \_ bash
> 11472 pts/11   S+     0:00  |   |       \_ apt-get install tetex-extra
> 12062 pts/11   S+     0:00  |   |           \_ /usr/bin/dpkg --status-fd 18 --configure tetex-base tetex-bin tetex-extra
> 12063 pts/11   S+     0:00  |   |               \_ /bin/sh -e /var/lib/dpkg/info/tetex-base.postinst configure
> 13337 pts/11   R+     7:06  |   |                   \_ kpsewhich --format=web2c files fmtutil.cnf
>
> 30027 pts/11   S      0:00 /bin/sh -e /var/lib/dpkg/info/tetex-bin.postinst configure
> 30211 pts/11   S      0:00  \_ /bin/sh /usr/bin/fmtutil --all
>  6929 pts/11   S      0:00      \_ /bin/sh /usr/bin/fmtutil --all
>  6930 pts/11   S      0:00          \_ /bin/sh /usr/bin/fmtutil --all
>  6931 pts/11   R     11:09              \_ kpsewhich --var-value=TEXMFMAIN

This is very strange, because tetex-bin is configured while tetex-base's
configure script is still running.  

There is an error related to this in tetex-base's postinst script, it
doesn't check properly whether kpsewhich works.  But I'm surprised that
it doesn't just exit - it looks as if it was waiting for something, but
doing that in the background.  Does anybody see what the problem is?

Maybe we should just take the code from dh_installtex.

Regards, Frank
-- 
Dr. Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)