[6268] in Release_7.7_team
Re: Installation results
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Evan Broder)
Wed Mar 4 15:24:34 2009
Message-ID: <49AEE355.1060409@mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:23:49 -0500
From: Evan Broder <broder@MIT.EDU>
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To: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@mit.edu>
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Jonathan Reed wrote:
> - texlive, specifically the 5 billion fonts we install, totally
> sucks. It runs mktexlsr and updmap-sys after every single font
> package, which takes a LONG time. (This is after installation, not
> the "Setting up..." stage). I wonder if there's any way we can (for
> summer, not now) do something clever to work around this.
This is essentially why the "triggers" feature was introduced in dpkg.
Basically, if you have multiple packages that all run the same command
during their postinst, you can instead schedule the command to get run
when all of those packages have been installed. If you've ever seen a
comment about something like "running delayed actions", that's what's
happening.
I believe that currently only ldconfig and update-initramfs support
triggers, because it was introduced fairly late in the Lenny release
process. I looked at one point into what it would take to add trigger
support to texlive, but got caught up in understanding the packaging,
which is fairly convoluted.
It looks like someone at Debian has also been looking into adding
triggers to texlive (#485866, or
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=485866), but the
discussion on that bug suggests that fixing mktexlsr is hard. I have no
idea if that's true, but I'm totally skeptical given how ldconfig and
update-initramfs were handled.
I didn't see anything in Launchpad about using triggers with texlive,
but I only skimmed.
This is something that probably won't be fixed in Intrepid. We might
have a chance of fixing it Jaunty, but given the feature freeze it would
probably be hard. If someone on the Debathena/Athena dev team made it a
priority, we could almost certainly get it fixed for Karmic.
- Evan
