Bugzilla – Bug 799489
latex takes forever to install.
Last modified: 2013-01-24 09:50:54 UTC
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0 I normally wait till the final release before installing latex. However, because of the reorganization, I decided to test install with 12.3 Beta1. The output of "ps" shows that I started Yast at 2:12 pm. I took perhaps 5 minutes or so making selections in Software Manager. It is now 3:40 pm. It shows as 83% complete, and that number (83%) has been steady for a while. Individual packages are installing, but very slowly. My best guess - there is probably a finishing script that is run after each package, to update the database. With a large number of packages - I seem to recall around 750, but Yast is too busy for me to be able to scroll back and check - this involves a lot of unnecessary work. Maybe the reorganization was not a good idea after all. Reproducible: Didn't try Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
I can confirm that installing the recommended set of latex packages (for example, when installed as dependencies of texmaker or other latex front-ends) takes incredibly long (for me just the installation, not counting the downloading time, itself took a few hours; this used to be at most about half an hour including downloading and installing for texlive in 12.2). CC'ing texlive maintainer.
The problem is zypper+rpm. Zypper is not able to perform the posttrans scripts only once as rpm does not provide an --noposttrans option. And zypper does not use the rpm only once for all packages but for every package it executes a single rpm command. The rpm allows to touch tag files in the %post scriptlests which will be used then in the final %posttrans scriptlets. That allows that you cann install e.g. 100 packages each touching the same tag file and then the the posttrans scriptlets will be called after all packages had been installed. With zyppers way this can not work. and upstream of rpm does not allow to skip the %posttrans scriptlets to enable zypper to do this on its own after installing all packages. I've reported this problem long time ago to both maintainers of (lib)zypp(er) and rpm. It looks like upstream rpm is not interested in providing an --noposttrans option.
. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 773575 ***