mactex-texlive-20250216.pkg fails

[Bruno Voisin]

> Michael Byczkowski wrote:
> 
> Sadly, the pretest package mactex-texlive-20250216.pkg breaks in the end with
> 
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: entering extended mode
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: (/usr/local/texlive/2025/texmf-dist/tex/hitex/base/hilatex.ini
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: (/usr/local/texlive/2025/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/latex.ltx
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: (/usr/local/texlive/2025/texmf-dist/tex/latex/base/texsys.cfg)
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: ./texsys.aux found
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: \@currdir set to: ./.
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: Assuming \openin and \input 
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: have the same search path.
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: Defining UNIX/DOS style filename parser.
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: catcodes, registers, parameters,
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: LaTeX2e <2024-11-01> patch level 2
> Feb 22 12:03:32 by-online package_script_service[1440]: ./postinstall: (/usr/local/texlive/2025/texmf-dist/tex/latex/l3kernel/expl3.ltx
> Feb 22 12:03:33 by-online package_script_service[1440]: PackageKit: Terminating PKInstallTask(pid:1441). Task has exceeded its 600 seconds of runtime.
> [...]


The break seems to happen when the postinstall script runs

/usr/local/texlive/2025/bin/universal-darwin/fmtutil-sys --all

at the end. It seems that building the formats takes too long, and is interrupted after 10 minutes.

I did notice (and other macOS pretesters as well) that the format rebuilds after package updates in tlmgr take much longer than before, up to 5 minutes say. Maybe there are simply more formats than before to build.

10 minutes feels like a really really long time, but maybe this happens on slower Macs.

Does this happen again if you try to install mactex-texlive-20250216.pkg again?

I wasn't aware there was a runtime limit for macOS install packages. Indeed, the man page for pkgbuild says

--scripts scripts-path
              [...] If the script needs to run for longer than 10
             minutes, it should be added as a component-specific script with
             the BundleInstallScriptTimeout component key added.

So if the problem is confirmed, maybe this BundleInstallScriptTimeout should be set.

Bruno Voisin


PS Should you need to unpack the install package, to see its content, you can use say

pkgutil --expand mactex-texlive-20250216.pkg mactex-texlive-20250216

The postinstall script is at

mactex-texlive-20250216/TeXLive-2025-Start.pkg/Scripts/postinstall

The same with the undocumented --expand-full option will unpack the payload as well.