[OS X TeX] Fwd: [Ii2-announce] New i-Installer version (2.90), updated i-Packages

[Bruno Voisin]

Given the potential importance for OS X TeX users, I'm forwarding the  
announcement of a new version of i-Installer and i-Packages, working  
around a bug of the tar utility in the most recent versions of OS X  
(10.5.4 surely, earlier versions of Leopard possibly). People  
installing TeX using MacTeX, not i-Installer, are not affected.

The problem is observed for tar archives containing files with  
resource forks (appearing in listing of the archive content as  
additional files with same names as the original files prefaced with  
"._"). When unarchiving one such archive, in each affected  
subdirectory a spurious file is created, with same name as the first  
file in the subdirectory and random three-letter extension.

Now, i-Packages contain .tar.bz2 compressed archives, uncompressed and  
unarchived at install time by calling tar. Some of them were affected  
by this bug, and accordingly their installation on recent versions of  
OS X resulted in the creation of spurious files such as, for  
Ghostscript,

/usr/local/share/ghostscript/8.62/Resource/Encoding/Wingdings. 
[random-3-letter-extension]

The result, when typesetting in TeX and Ghostscript mode, was a  
message like that reported on <http://www.apfelwiki.de/forum/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1690 
 >:

Unrecoverable error: undefinedresource in findresource
Operand stack:
     1  FontEmulationProcs  encodingnames  --nostringval--  --
nostringval--  StandardEncoding  --nostringval--  ISOLatin1Encoding  --
nostringval--  SymbolEncoding  --nostringval--  DingbatsEncoding  --
nostringval--  StandardEncoding  --nostringval--  SymbolEncoding  --
nostringval--  ISOLatin1Encoding  --nostringval--  DingbatsEncoding
Wingdings.fbD  Wingdings.fbD  Encoding  24  Wingdings.fbD
Unrecoverable error: undefined in findresource
Operand stack:
     1  FontEmulationProcs  encodingnames  --nostringval--  --
nostringval--  StandardEncoding  --nostringval--  ISOLatin1Encoding  --
nostringval--  SymbolEncoding  --nostringval--  DingbatsEncoding  --
nostringval--  StandardEncoding  --nostringval--  SymbolEncoding  --
nostringval--  ISOLatin1Encoding  --nostringval--  DingbatsEncoding
Wingdings.fbD  Wingdings.fbD  Encoding  24  Wingdings.fbD
### FAILED to generate /tmp/altpdflatex.1855-1215093180/test.pdf ()

The new version of i-Installer and i-Packages are immune to this  
problem, and cure existing installations affected by it.

Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin


> De : Gerben Wierda
> Date : 8 juillet 2008 17:23:50 HAEC
> À : ii2-announce
> Objet : [Ii2-announce] New i-Installer version (2.90), updated i- 
> Packages
>
> Removing leftover bits of previous versions of the i-Package (as
> contents may evolve over time) has always been a weak point of i-
> Installer. The removal process is rather not smart. I have improved
> this by adding some stuff to i-Installer itself and i-Packages that
> use it will have better uninstall behaviour.
>
> Furthermore, I have adapted
> 	fontconfig,
> 	ghostscript,
> 	ImageMagick and
> 	FontForge
> to use this improved mechanism.
>
> As some of you may already know, there is a bug in OS X's tar which
> affects i-Installer. This bugs lets tar create spurious extra files
> which are not in the archive (files with random three-letter
> extensions added to existing file names). For this reason a few
> affected i-Packages have recently been updated (ghostscript,
> fontconfig, ImageMagick, FontForge) so they do not trigger the bug.
> Only ghostscript was seriously affected because the created extra
> files played havoc with Ghostscript's operations resulting in a non-
> working installation.
>
> Since ghostscript is actually crippled by the spurious files created
> by the bug in OS X, I have improved the ghostscript i-Package that it
> will tell you if it was unable to clear out an old install entirely
> and offer you the option to remove the entire ghostscript support
> files location (/usr/local/share/ghostscript). This removal is
> generally a safe option, but since it could be that people put stuff
> there by hand it is an optional action in the ghostscript. Since the  
> i-
> Package removes old installs both during uninstall and during install,
> you will also get this option if you install and you have these
> spurious files. In other words: reinstalling the ghostscript i-Package
> and saying yes to the option if it appears will clear out the spurious
> files that hurt ghostscript ability to execute.
>
> The other installs do not suffer from these ill-effects, so it is safe
> to leave the junk there. I might improve the other i-Packages at a
> later date.
>
> G
> _______________________________________________
> II2-announce mailing list
> II2-announce
> http://mail.rna.nl/mailman/listinfo/ii2-announce