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

[Julian Gilbey <jdg@polya.uklinux.net>]

On Wed, Dec 06, 2006 at 09:37:30AM +0100, Frank Küster wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> what should we do about this bug?

I don't know.

> Julian Gilbey <jdg@polya.uklinux.net> wrote:
> 
> > On Thu, Nov 23, 2006 at 02:23:15PM +0100, Marcin Juszkiewicz wrote:
> >
> >> > echo $HOME
> >> 
> >> /home/hrw/
> >
> > That's not: $HOME should not have a trailing slash.
> 
> Should this be documented somewhere more clearly?  Or can we just assume
> a sane setting, at least for the TeX packages?

This we should either do, or suggest that libkpathsea removes any
trailing slashes from $HOME.

> >> > > and here it start to go through filesystem and loops in kernel build
> >> > > due to symlinks:
> >> [...]
> >> 
> >> > Then again, symlink loops like this are just plain evil.
> >> 
> >> Blame kernel-package?
> >> 
> >> 12:58 hrw@work:hrw$ pwd
> >> /home/hrw
> >> 12:58 hrw@work:hrw$ ll src/linux/debian/linux-image-2.6.19-rc5/lib/modules/2.6.19-rc5/source
> >> lrwxrwxrwx 1 hrw pavilon 19 2006-11-10 15:51 src/linux/debian/linux-image-2.6.19-rc5/lib/modules/2.6.19-rc5/source -> /home/hrw/src/linux
> >
> > I see.  kernel-package places a symlink from source to the source of
> > the tree.  That's weird, I guess.  Maybe worth filing a bug against
> > kernel-package?
> 
> I'm not sure think this is a bug.  If I understood the directory
> structure correctly, this is a built tree under debian/<packagename>,
> ready to be packaged into a deb file.  So if the symlink is supposed to
> be there, it's correct that it is circular in this unpacked version.

This symlink is an absolute reference to the source tree on the
builder's machine.  How could that possibly be useful on anyone else's
random machine?  If it were a symlink to /usr/src/linux* that would be
a different story.  Note that the binary package deletes the symlink
on installation (search for "source" in
/var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-image*.postinst); it would be better IMHO if
it were deleted at the end of the build.

   Julian