Hi
On Sun, 11 Oct 2026, Hilmar Preuße wrote:
> > if maybe something is broken. Knowing which command is actually being run
> > tells
> > me that it's one command that takes a long time and not a thousand
> > executions
> > which each are short but are being repeated and it allows me to open up the
> > man
> > page to figure out what that tool does to verify that yes, it makes sense
> > that
> > running that command really does takes that long.
Yes, these runs are necessary, or you end up with outdated (in the best
case) or broken (in the normal case) latex/pdflatex/xelatex/lualatex/...
> Building format(s) (by calling "fmtutil-sys --all").
I think that is enough. It is all you can say at this point in time.
> This script calls iniTeX for all or added format files. This may take some
> time...
I have implemented parallel execution of fmtutil calls recently, so if
you make a new checkout, you can call
fmtutil-sys --parallel=auto --all
which runs with # of CPU/cores, but max 8, in parallel.
Experiments have shown a drastic drop in run time.
> fmtutil itself does no provide a progress bar nor does it display each
> iniTeX call one by one. And not, I'm not really willing to implement that.
Well, that is not true. We^WYou (I am not Debian anymore) capture the
output and only show it when fmtutil builds fail. And there the command
line is shown
$ fmtutil-sys --all
...
fmtutil: running `aleph -ini -jobname=aleph -progname=aleph
*aleph.ini' ...
...
Best regards
Norbert
--
DI Dr Norbert Preining + https://www.preining.info
arXiv + IFMGA Guide + TeX Live
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