Hi,

I just installed texlive-full and at the end when triggers were being
processed I was waiting 24 minutes at this step:

Processing triggers for tex-common (6.20)…
Running updmap-sys. This may take some time... done.
Running mktexlsr /var/lib/texmf ... done.
Building format(s) --all.
	This may take some time...

It says what is being done for updmap-sys and mktexlsr but those are done
relatively quickly. For a command which takes nearly half an hour, I would've
liked to be able to read what exactly is taking such a long time. I then read
the postinst maintainer script to find out but I think I shouldn't have to. I
think if the user is waiting for something to be done for that long, they
should also get a bit more information about what is happening.

Maybe the "Building format" step can print the command that is being run in the
same way as it is already done for updmap-sys and mktexlsr?

Thanks!

cheers, josch

Am 20.07.2026 um 11:28 schrieb Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:

Hello,

Well, fmtutil-sys can run longer in larger installations. Does it really
help you, if it tells, which command takes that long?

Here is a suggestion:

https://github.com/debian-tex/tex-common/commit/57807f4b8cbfefef47835784599daaea29c949a4

Hilmar

Hi,

Quoting Preuße, Hilmar (2026-07-20 23:06:16)

thank you!

You are an expert of this package so of course you know what is happening. I'm
not and when I'm faced with an installation step that takes more than 20
minutes then yes, I'd like to know what's going on, what is taking so long and
if maybe something is broken. Knowing which command is actually being run tells
me that it's one command that takes a long time and not a thousand executions
which each are short but are being repeated and it allows me to open up the man
page to figure out what that tool does to verify that yes, it makes sense that
running that command really does takes that long.

Thanks!

cheers, josch

20min ... that is even for old machines **very** long.
Do you have some "specific" setup like NFS mounts where TeX files
resides?

Best

Norbert

Am 21.07.2026 um 04:52 schrieb Norbert Preining:

Hilmar

Eventually you can run "find /var/lib/texmf/web2c/ -type f -name \*log
|xargs ls -lt" to figure if there are specific TeX calls, which take a
long time.

H.

Hi,

Quoting Norbert Preining (2026-07-21 04:52:30)

indeed more accurate number is 25 minutes and 16 seconds (I compared
timestamps). The machine is the MNT Reform open hardware laptop with a Banana
Pi CM4 A311D. So yes, the CPU is slow. It has six cores but it seems like only
one of them was used for the whole operation. On top of that, the system was
running from an SD-card so the I/O is very slow as well (20 MB/s R/W but I
think the operation is CPU bound).  And on top of that this was a fresh
installation of texlive-all, so nearly 10 GB of packages got installed all in a
single "apt install".

Thanks!

cheers, josch

Hmm, ok. I think not only TeX Live installation might be slow ...

Best

Norbert

Am 21.07.2026 um 08:36 schrieb Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues:
 >> On Tue, 21 Jul 2026, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote:

Hello,
So, I guess it is serial execution. On my Raspberry Pi5 (with
texlive-full installed in a chroot) the "fmtutil-sys --all" run takes 5
minutes,

Hilmar