Hi Darik,
Repacking T2502 with a modern deflate32 implementation adds 45 MB of usable payload space in the FreeDOS distribution media.
You say it would need UNZIP 6 for DOS and would not work with PKZIP 2. Assuming that we want the ZIPs or other packages to still unpack reasonably well even on 8086, how about using ADVZIP instead? https://github.com/amadvance/advancecomp/releases - also for DOS :-) This will not cause increased requirements for the unpacker.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1f_6OqBynrWtStkOux13g3XiuzTku75l5/view
* The DOJS.ZIP and CURL.ZIP packages each contain a large SOURCES.7Z file that skews distribution size. In the next FreeDOS release, using 7z for all source code might obviate any more package removals.
I am not sure whether we want to 7Z all sources, but Jerome has added support for 7Z compressed sources and we updated the CURL package, which originally contained sources of TWO versions of OPENSSL, as well as some large compile time test data sets never used in DOS - no toolchain for using them in DOS. As you see in https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/test/report.html the CURL package now is only 11 MB. That was 35 MB before :-)) See the thread "our curl could use dos version 8.5.0 and shrink to half the size" starting 2024-11-02. However, the DOJS package still is 42 MB. For many ideas of how to make that smaller, please see the not-discussed-yet 2024-11-02 mail: "dojs package has nested source archive and could be a lot smaller" and the big 2024-11-26 thread "DOjS update and size suggestions". This got the package down from 61 MB to 42 MB, but there clearly still is room for improvements. The package already omits sources of a SECOND Allegro version not used in DOS compiles and some large test data of MBEDTLS which cannot be used in DOS anyway. Open issues with DOJS: It contains DXE, for which I know no good run-time packer. And it contains some large BMP and TGA examples. You could negotiate with the upstream maintainers to include fewer BMP and TGA examples and more PNG, JPG or WEBP :-) Yes, WEBP in DOS!
* Repacking everything as 7z adds 250 MB of usable payload space in the distribution media. A baseline 80386/4MB machine can unpack 7z archives having 1 MB dictionary sizes...
You would be unable to install DOS on computers with < 2 MB RAM then. Using SOURCES.7Z seems okay for those packages which need 386 anway, but I would not 7Z the complete ZIP packages needed for installation. However, 7ZIP is an example of a solid archive format, so in the same spirit, you could investigate whether using TGZ has advantages when compared to ZIP, while making sure that both use compression settings suitable for decompression on computers with only 640k RAM. Solid archives compress better, but make access to file listings and individual files harder. This is why 7ZIP has configurable "solid". Cheers, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
