Bug#594743: texlive-binaries: pdftex slow to generate sources when $HOME contains a trailing "/".
Package: texlive-binaries
Version: 2009-6
Severity: important
Hi,
When $HOME contains a trailing "/", pdftex takes an absolute age to generate
a PDF file from a .tex source file. It seems this problem has been reported
once before, in 2008, in Ubuntu, as per the following report:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/texlive-bin/+bug/192877
This bug is still very present in today's version of TeX Live, so I am very
dubious about the claim that it's fixed upstream. It's easy to reproduce --
just compare the following:
1. HOME="$HOME/" time pdftex some_file.tex
2. HOME="/home/$USER" time pdftex some_file.tex
Running number (1) above will result in pdftex sitting there with 100% CPU
and an ever-increasing load average. On my machine it took ~36 minutes to
run. Compared with (2) which took 0.9 seconds.
Note that this bug also affects installing TeX Live -- and in no word of a
joke, installing the texlive meta package took over 24 hours of a straight
run -- all because my $HOME has a trailing slash on it.
Note also that I do not override the system default value of what $HOME is
set to - so I would be very reluctant indeed to suggest that one should
change their $HOME to not contain a trailing slash. Doing this in a shell
startup file simply spells disaster, so this bug needs fixing upstream
still.
-- System Information:
Debian Release: squeeze/sid
APT prefers unstable
APT policy: (500, 'unstable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Kernel: Linux 2.6.32-5-686 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Versions of packages texlive-binaries depends on:
ii libc6 2.11.2-2 Embedded GNU C Library: Shared lib
ii libfontconfig1 2.8.0-2.1 generic font configuration library
ii libfreetype6 2.3.11-1 FreeType 2 font engine, shared lib
ii libgcc1 1:4.4.4-6 GCC support library
ii libkpathsea5 2009-6 TeX Live: path search library for
ii libncurses5 5.7+20100313-2 shared libraries for terminal hand
ii libpng12-0 1.2.44-1 PNG library - runtime
ii libpoppler5 0.12.4-1 PDF rendering library
ii libstdc++6 4.4.4-6 The GNU Standard C++ Library v3
ii libx11-6 2:1.3.3-3 X11 client-side library
ii libxaw7 2:1.0.7-1 X11 Athena Widget library
ii libxmu6 2:1.0.5-1 X11 miscellaneous utility library
ii libxpm4 1:3.5.8-1 X11 pixmap library
ii libxt6 1:1.0.7-1 X11 toolkit intrinsics library
ii tex-common 2.08 common infrastructure for building
ii zlib1g 1:1.2.3.4.dfsg-3 compression library - runtime
texlive-binaries recommends no packages.
texlive-binaries suggests no packages.
-- no debconf information
-- Thomas Adam
--
"It was the cruelest game I've ever played and it's played inside my head."
-- "Hush The Warmth", Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.
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