[OS X TeX] Problems with i-installer

[Gerben Wierda]

On Jun 22, 2006, at 16:19, Simon Spiegel wrote:

> I'm having serious problems here. It started this morning with TeXShop 
> telling me that it couldn't find pdflatex.fmt. After some fiddling 
> around I decided to re-install TeX with the i-installer. No luck here 
> either. I tried several times, but at the end of the config process 
> the installer seems to hang. It doesn't really freeze, the progress 
> bar is still cycling and I can quit the i-installer, but nothing 
> happens. It seems to be in some kind of endless loop.

You seem to have solved this in the meantime, but for others: endless 
loops or hanging is very rare. What does happen sometimes is an endless 
loop while creating formats, mostly because some basic format fails 
(e.g. a broken hyphenation file) and some other format depends on it. 
fmtutil may go into an endless loop. The Subprocess output tab will 
show you if something like this is happening and with the Activity tab 
you can kill the subprocess.

The ps command in Terminal will also show you what is running, "ps 
laxww" will show everything, more or less. You can spot frozen programs 
there.

But most often I have encountered situations where things did run but 
for some reason extremely slowly. One person had a HOME environment 
variable that contained two successive slashes "//" which is OK for 
almost any app, except TeX which interprets it as "from this place on, 
search the entire subdirectory set". This person had a GB home 
directory on a network drive and the result of this variable was that 
every file earch call in TeX took a long time, and there are many such 
calls. I calculated at that time that configuration was proceeding, but 
that it would take a couple of weeks to finish.

G

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