FS#12985 - TeXLive: texmfstart hangs on every execution

Attached to Project: Arch Linux
Opened by Bjoern Hiller (Zaphod) - Monday, 26 January 2009, 14:20 GMT
Last edited by Aaron Griffin (phrakture) - Monday, 26 January 2009, 20:01 GMT
Task Type Bug Report
Category Packages: Extra
Status Closed
Assigned To Francois Charette (Firmicus)
Architecture All
Severity Low
Priority Normal
Reported Version None
Due in Version Undecided
Due Date Undecided
Percent Complete 100%
Votes 0
Private No

Details

Description:
Every invocation of texmfstart (which is used by mptopf and a couple of other scripts[1]) hangs almost immediately. Tracking down the problem I found, that texmfstart tries to create an instance of KpseRemote[2] which causes the failure as it does not return anymore. I tried starting some kind of server for this with 'KPSEPORT=7000 KPSEMETHOD=drb texmfstart --serve', but then mptopdf fails as mptopdf.pl could not be located. The only way to get mptopdf working is using an empty environment variable for KPSEPORT (for some unknown reason a empty KPSEMETHOD does not work).

Additional info:
* package version(s)
texlive-bin 2008-3

Steps to reproduce:
Try starting 'texmfstart --help'.

possible workaround:
Include some profile script which sets KPSEPORT as empty variable.

[1] grep 'texmfstart.*"$@"' /usr/bin/* 2>/dev/null to get a full list of scripts.
[2] line 1417 in /usr/bin/texmfstart
This task depends upon

Closed by  Aaron Griffin (phrakture)
Monday, 26 January 2009, 20:01 GMT
Reason for closing:  None
Additional comments about closing:  Solved
Comment by Francois Charette (Firmicus) - Monday, 26 January 2009, 16:29 GMT
I'm not a ConTeXt user so I'm unfamiliar with this. But here texmfstart --help works fine.
I would need more information to debug this. Please send me (<francois at archlinux.org>) your file texmf.cfg and an strace of texmfstart, perhaps together with a minimal example .mp file on which to run mptopdf
Comment by Bjoern Hiller (Zaphod) - Monday, 26 January 2009, 19:36 GMT
After your message I did some further testing. On my other machine texmfstart --help runs without any problems (as in your case) and both machines (my laptop and my desktop) use exactly the same texmf.cnf. Finally I looked at /etc/hosts and located the problem there, as there was a wrong line with my hostname but a different IP as DHCP provided for the host. Removing this line, texmf --help runs without problem on my laptop, too. So, this bug can be closed.

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