Am 22.01.2013 11:19, schrieb Vincent van Ravesteijn:
In any case, the installation may take 30 minutes if you have a fresh MikTeX installation.
I did this fresh installation the last 2 weeks on 4 different PCs several times again and again to fix some installer and a MiKTeX bug. On the slowest, an EEEPC it took about 15 minutes on the fastest (a desktop PC) it took less than 5 minutes. I tested this with the same Internet connection, so only the PC speed seems to be important.
Isn't there the possibility to either use the miktex-sdk or to call the miktex-updater with command-line options to install the packages we need ? I guess this would go much quicker than to run the configure script to install the packages.
The MiKTeX package manager runs the same commands as the chkconfig.ltx file that we call from configure.py. Because what our TeX file does is to tell MiKTeX it needs a missing package. Thus MiKTeX's package manager comes into play and downloads the packages. If you try to do the same using MiKTeX's package manager GUI and select all packages you need and install them at once you are not faster because also in this case every package is unpacked separately.
While thinking of it, the reason for the slowness might be that MiKTeX is updating the file name database after each package unpacking. I'll discuss this with the MiKTeX maintainer if this is really necessary. If not, I'll request that the MiKTeX SDK supports this.
regards Uwe
