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

[Frank Küster <frank@debian.org>]

Florent Rougon <f.rougon@free.fr> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Frank Küster <frank@debian.org> wrote:
>
>> tetex-bin's postinst script is already being run.  Does anybody know
>> whether it is expected that a maintainer script does not look like being
>> a child of "apt-get", as is the case here for tetex-bin?
>               ^^^^^^^
>                dpkg
>
> This can happen if:
>
>   1) dpkg was killed (therefore, it couldn't use waitpid(2) for the
>      child process running
>      '/bin/sh -e $path_to/tetex-bin.postinst configure', which resulted
>      in the child process being "adopted" by init).
>
>   2) tetex-bin's postinst was still running when the 'ps axf' command
>      was run.

But that

- does not explain why tetex-bin's postinst was called at all before
  tetex-base' was ready

- why dpkg was killed.

The process ID of tetex-bin's postinst (30027) is way higher than that
of tetex-base's, 12063, which in turn is just by one higher than dpkg's.
Maybe in fact the problem is that tetex-bin's postinst never finished
from a previous try, but is "harmless", and then when tetex-base is
configured "again" the memory and CPU gets eaten up?

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