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

On 7/21/26 12:40 AM, Johannes Schauer Marin Rodrigues wrote:

Hello Josch,

As found out, the execution time of your "fmtutil-sys --all" call is
quite long.

I do not really know, how to proceed here. I've changed the postinst
script to tell, what command is called. I could elaborate a little, what
this exactly means, currently is displayed:

Running mktexlsr /var/lib/texmf ... done.
Building format(s) (by calling "fmtutil-sys --all").
This script calls iniTeX for all or added format files. This may take
some time...

fmtutil itself does no provide a progress bar nor does it display each
iniTeX call one by one. And not, I'm not really willing to implement that.

Let me know your thoughts.

Hilmar

Hi

Yes, these runs are necessary, or you end up with outdated (in the best
case) or broken (in the normal case) latex/pdflatex/xelatex/lualatex/...

I think that is enough. It is all you can say at this point in time.

I have implemented parallel execution of fmtutil calls recently, so if
you make a new checkout, you can call
	fmtutil-sys --parallel=auto --all
which runs with # of CPU/cores, but max 8, in parallel.

Experiments have shown a drastic drop in run time.

Well, that is not true. We^WYou (I am not Debian anymore) capture the
output and only show it when fmtutil builds fail. And there the command
line is shown
	$ fmtutil-sys --all
	...
	fmtutil: running `aleph -ini   -jobname=aleph -progname=aleph *aleph.ini' ...
	...

Best regards

Norbert

On 10/11/26 7:30 PM, Norbert Preining wrote:
 > On Sun, 11 Oct 2026, Hilmar Preuße wrote:

Hi,

Thanks for heads up. I checked "svn log
./texk/texlive/linked_scripts/texlive/fmtutil.pl" in the TL SVN trunk,
but didn't find anything. What did I miss?

Of course you are right. We redirect that to a log file, which IMHO does
make more sense. We could use some tee(1) and just display "running
`aleph -ini.." calls, but if the execution time drops by parallel
processing, probably nobody will ask any more.

Hilmar

Look into texmf-dist/scripts/texlive/fmtutil.pl this is the authorize source.

LG

Norbert

On 10/11/26 8:17 PM, Norbert Preining wrote:

Hello Norbert,

(arm64-sid)root@rasppi3:~# time fmtutil --sys --strict
--no-error-if-no-engine=luajittex,mfluajit,luajithbtex --all
real	4m47.426s
user	4m45.537s
sys	0m1.843s

(arm64-sid)root@rasppi3:~# time fmtutil.pl --sys --strict
--no-error-if-no-engine=luajittex,mfluajit,luajithbtex --parallel --all
real	1m21.349s
user	4m52.993s
sys	0m2.204s

Impressive! This is the fmtutil.pl dated 2026-10-08, which is not yet in
the archive. I'll change tex-common to call fmtutil with option
--parallel after next upload of texlive-base.

Good, to speak about this topic! Many thanks!

Hilmar

Hi Hilmar,

No need, the default will be switched tomorrow to enable --prefetch=auto
for tlmgr/install-tl (not relevant for Debian), and --parallel=auto for
fmtutil (relevant).

You should get the "upgrade" for free ;-)

Best regards

Norbert

We believe that the bug you reported is fixed in the latest version of
tex-common, which is due to be installed in the Debian FTP archive.

A summary of the changes between this version and the previous one is
attached.

Thank you for reporting the bug, which will now be closed.  If you
have further comments please address them to 1142467@bugs.debian.org,
and the maintainer will reopen the bug report if appropriate.

Debian distribution maintenance software
pp.
Hilmar Preuße <hille42@debian.org> (supplier of updated tex-common package)

(This message was generated automatically at their request; if you
believe that there is a problem with it please contact the archive
administrators by mailing ftpmaster@ftp-master.debian.org)
Format: 1.8
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 2026 22:16:36 +0200
Source: tex-common
Architecture: source
Version: 6.21
Distribution: unstable
Urgency: medium
Maintainer: Debian TeX Task Force <debian-tex-maint@lists.debian.org>
Changed-By: Hilmar Preuße <hille42@debian.org>
Closes: 1127099 1142467
Changes:
 tex-common (6.21) unstable; urgency=medium
 .
   * Hand over creating and deletion of /usr/local/share/texmf to dh_usrlocal
     (Closes: #1127099).
   * Inform better, what is done during postinst call (Closes: #1142467).
 .
   * We are back on salsa.
   * Add debian/gitlab-ci.yml.
   * Install files a little more Debianish.
   * Lintian clean up.
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