[OS X TeX] New Pretest Versions

[Richard Koch]

Axel,

Your email, and various followups, proved very useful. I think we now have
a handle on the entire problem.


On Jun 4, 2014, at 1:54 PM, Axel Kielhorn <tex at axelkielhorn.de> wrote:


> You misunderstood.
> It says it will take 15 minutes, for almost an hour.
> It later changed to 9 minutes and that was correct.
> This is a 1.25 GHz PPC, I didn't expect it to be fast.
> Installing the files was fast, the post installation scripts took a rather long time.


I have the PPC MacPro introduced by Apple at WWDC in 2003. This machine
was fast for its day. When I have to rebuild TeX Live, I start the build on the
PPC machine, and then separately build the Intel Leopard version on a 17" Intel
portable. When that finishes, I reboot to a different partition on the 17" portable
and build the Snow Leopard version. Usually this build finishes within seconds
of the completion of the PPC version. So the PPC, which was FAST in 2003, is SLOW
in 2014.

I timed a new install of MacTeX on the PPC machine and it took 5 and a half minutes.
But this install built no new formats. I believe that building new formats would take
quite a while. Hence in Europe, where the change from letter paper to a4 paper
requires rebuilding formats, PPC owners will have a long install.


> 
> When I ran the lualatex test program latex tried to build the cache.
> That is normal and takes about a minute on my intel computer. (with TL2013)
> On the PPC it took several minutes with a lot of error messages and a Bus Error.


This entirely agrees with my experience. I think it has nothing to do with the install time.
Instead, the first time a user tries to run LuaTeX, the font cache will be built.

Moreover, there is no doubt that luaotfload calls Kluaotfload and that is the program
which causes problems.

I think the solution is to add an expanded luaotfload-blacklist.cfg file. Is there a way
to create such a file which will only run on PPC but not on Intel?

It is too late to do this for the DVD version of MacTeX. For the internet release,
we may have time. We could also provide the blacklist file on the MacTeX site and
refer PPC users who run into the problem to that site.

This is the week of WWDC, the developer conference in the Mac world. Apple is
making videos of all the sessions available to developers. So I'm going to ignore
this issue until next week and return to sitting at home, coke in hand, watching
television.

Dick Koch