[Tex/LaTex] Why texlive installation is so slow

texlivetexlive-2019

Why texlive installation is so slow? It installs programs piecewise, instead of extracting a compressed file.

Is there a reason for this? I am doing this on Windows 10.

Best Answer

The TeX Live distribution already contains compressed archives (.tar.xz) and these are used for installation. The reason why it is slow is that there are a lot packages, and for each there are between 1 and 4 archives to be downloaded, decompressed (xz), and unpackaged (tar).

Furthermore, there is no multi-threaded installation, so the packages are done one-by-one and not in parallel.

Possible solutions would be providing a pre-installed TeX Live (something MacTeX is doing) which just contains all the files in one big archive. We are volunteers and preparing such a distribution is currently out of our hands, but everyone is free to provide something similar, and we (TeX Live Team) will be happy to look at it and maybe integrate it.