Buggy "mime-support" package? :-(
One thing which really bothers me about Debian-1.2 is that it almost
takes ages for lynx to come up at my 486DX-33 with 20MB. Measuring time
for starting lynx with a locally served web page (apache) i get the
following result:
----------------------------cut-here------------------------------------
[pseelig]/home/pseelig > date ; xterm -e lynx http://localhost/ && date
Sun Jan 5 03:10:16 MET 1997
Sun Jan 5 03:12:33 MET 1997
[pseelig]/home/pseelig >
----------------------------cut-here------------------------------------
During these incredible *2 minutes and 17 seconds* there goes on a lot
of testing in the background as can be verified with the 'ps' command:
----------------------------cut-here------------------------------------
[pseelig]/home/pseelig > ps
PID TT STAT TIME COMMAND
229 p0 S 0:02 /bin/bash
403 p2 S 0:34 pine -i
5903 p4 S 0:02 /bin/bash
6509 p3 S 0:02 lynx http://localhost/
7286 p4 R 0:00 ps
7287 p3 S 0:00 sh -c test "`echo charset} | tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]"`" = iso-8
7288 p3 R 0:00 sh -c test "`echo charset} | tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]"`" = iso-8
7299 p3 R 0:00 sh -c test "`echo charset} | tr "[A-Z]" "[a-z]"`" = iso-8
[pseelig]/home/pseelig >
----------------------------cut-here------------------------------------
The same happens from time to time in 'pine' depending upon the message's
content which nonetheless are non critical ASCII texts. I just hate the
idea of having my system slowed down like this just for viewing ASCII
based texts like HTML or whatever.
Anyway, the main trouble seems to be that the Debian-1.2 /etc/mailcap has
grown to a rather ridiculous size as compared to the version provided with
Debian-1.1.xx:
----------------------------cut-here------------------------------------
[root]/root > v /etc/mailcap*
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 320596 Dec 24 04:12 /etc/mailcap
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 502 Nov 30 13:41 /etc/mailcap.bak
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 841 Dec 3 17:59 /etc/mailcap.dpkg-dist
----------------------------cut-here------------------------------------
Well, trying to deinstall the mime-support for apparent reasons i just get
*lots* of dependancy conflicts making it impossible to do without this
thing. Here the relevant lines from the dselect dialog:
----------------------------cut-here------------------------------------
pine depends on mime-support
apache depends on mime-support
xpdf depends on mime-support (>= 2.01-1)
metamail depends on mime-support (>= 2.02-1)
lynx recommends mime-support
xanim depends on mime-support (>= 2.08)
----------------------------cut-here------------------------------------
When i instead replace this overly large "/etc/mailcap" with the smaller
sized "/etc/mailcap.dpkg-dist" lynx takes less than 3 seconds to come up
at my humble system:
----------------------------cut-here------------------------------------
[pseelig]/home/pseelig > date ; xterm -e lynx http://localhost/ && date
Sun Jan 5 03:38:44 MET 1997
Sun Jan 5 03:38:48 MET 1997
[pseelig]/home/pseelig >
----------------------------cut-here------------------------------------
I don't know if this is a reasonable way of dealing with this problem but
at the moment i see no other way.
As 'dpkg --status mime-support' reveals:
"Other packages add themselves as viewers/editors/composers/etc by
using the provided "install-mime" program."
Maybe one of these other packages using "install-mime" has a bug resulting
in growing /etc/mailcap to such a large extent? Or maybe "install-mime"
itself has a bug? Anybody had similiar experiences?
I'll try it out by deinstalling and then reinstalling the packages that
depend on mime-support one of these days and if nobody else has already
found out what it is all about.
Regards, P. *8^)
--
Paul Seelig pseelig@goofy.zdv.uni-mainz.de
African Music Archive - Institute for Ethnology and Africa Studies
Johannes Gutenberg-University - Forum 6 - 55099 Mainz/Germany
Our AMA Homepage in the WWW at http://www.uni-mainz.de/~bender/
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