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

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Hi Marcin,

I hope I don't upset you by this e-mail bombardment...  But currently I
have some time to think about it and test, but I won't have much time
this weekend.  Here's one more suggestion for debugging.  Add the
following line to your sources.list:

deb http://people.debian.org/~frank/teTeX-3.0 experimental main

(don't be afraid about experimental, it only contains some tetex-base
packages for testing).  After apt-get update, "apt-cache policy
tetex-base" should list version 3.0.dfsg.3-2~1 as "Candidate". (If
that's not the case, there might be something "wrong" with
preferences). 

Please install this package the usual way, but also catch the output in
a file:

apt-get install tetex-extra 2>&1 | tee install.log

This will probably produce lots of output, and I don't know whether it
will stop at some point and hang, or go in circles.  Anyway, you'll be
able to see whether the error has been triggered (consumes much memory,
listing of ps axf).  If that has happened, interrupt it as usual, and
send the file install.log.

As I said, I won't be able to look at it soon, but I hope someone else
in the team will.

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