On Jul 19, John Clements wrote:
> On this page
>
> http://pre.racket-lang.org/release/installers/
>
> the reported size of the Windows installer is 29M, vs. about 47 or
> 48 M for other platforms. I see that this was true of the 5.0
> release as well, so this is probably expected, but I'm curious: why
> is this? Is it just that the other platforms are distributed
> uncompressed and rely upon dynamic compression?
* The Windows installers use some LZMA variant, so they have a really
good compression rate.
* On OSX, there is a flag for the dmg creation utility which does a
much poorer gzip compression. On a newer version there is a bzip2
compression flag too, and I *did* ask about using it -- and several
OSX users said that it's not a good idea. You can probably find
that exchange somewhere in the archives. (This would be easy to
change if it's fine now.)
* The linux installers use a gzipped tarball, hence the bad
compression factor. It can't rely even on bzip2 to be present since
we had an installer for Solaris too -- but perhaps it's time to
require one.
There's also a new compression utility called "xy" that looks very
good: it's compressing at rates that are better than the windows
installer (IIRC, it's some LZMA variant that is optimized somehow),
and while compression is slower and more memory intensive,
uncompressing is faster than with bunzip2. I've looked for some
statically linked and easy-to-turn-into-an-installer variant, but
didn't see anything promising.
--
((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay:
http://barzilay.org/ Maze is Life!
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