Update manager hangs during install from Feisty to Gutsy

[Johann Petrak]

I have run update-manager on my T60 ThinkPad running Feisty i386 with all current updates.
Downloading of all packages went well, but during the step "Installing the upgrades" everything stopped at the step:
  "Running mktexlsr. This may take a while. ... done"

In top I see the process kpsewhich under user root using 100% CPU, running for 30 minutes now and using up more and more memory (first time I looked it was 30MB, now it is at 80MB).

I had the "terminal" part of the update-manager GUI open .. the window does not react any more and that terminal section cannot be closed any more.

[Johann Petrak (johann-petrak)]

This seems to be an issue with kpsewhich .. after killing the hanging process, update manager showed an error notification and continued.
The error message in the terminal indicated that the error was in texlive-lang-danish.

After a little while, the update manager got into a hang again after installation of updmap-sys. Again, kpsewhich used 100% CPU and consumed memory.

I killed kpsewhich again and changed /usr/bin/kpsewhich to not be executable any longer so that I do not have to kill this dozens of times.
This helped to get the update process going again.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This bug did not have a package associated with it, which is important for ensuring that it gets looked at by the proper developers. You can learn more about finding the right package at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. I have classified this bug as a bug in update-manager.

[Paul Gevers (paul-climbing)]

Thanks for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Could you please add the log files from '/var/log/dist-upgrade/' to this bug report as separate attachments? Thanks in advance.

[Jonty (jonnty)]

The problem is that kpsewhich is looking for files in /usr/share, but /usr/share is not in $PATH so it doesn't know to look there. To solve this, I added /usr/share to the root $PATH by doing:

$ sudo -s
# $PATH=$PATH:/usr/share
# sudo apt-get install <whatever was causing the problem>

and it should work fine!

[Paul Gevers (paul-climbing)]

kpsewhich is part of the texlive-base package, so I am reclassifying there. Not sure if the bug is still relevant (it is old), so not changing the status as incomplete.

[rusivi2 (rusivi2-deactivatedaccount)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD development release - Maverick Meerkat. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/. Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for texlive-base (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]