Hi all, The FreeDOS repo ISO file that was published today can be reduced from 632MB to 579MB by repacking it. This adds 53MB of media headroom, which should reduce pressure to bump packages in future point releases.
Original (as of 2021-11-08): https://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/repositories/latest/cdrom.iso Repack: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1b7IE-EsK5R1ROmXTaEvYNi9-kfVvH5wi?usp=sharing The procedure is: 1. Unzip each FDN package. 2. Further unpack each ZIP and 7Z source file. 3. Zip+Store each SOURCES/* tree like it has LFN. 4. Rezip each FDN package like usual. 5. Optimize each package with AdvanceCOMP. The size at each step is: 660,869,928 bytes, original 629,362,932 bytes, rezipped with InfoZip 3.0 605,766,821 bytes, optimized with AdvZip 2.1 Everything stays in zip format 2.0 and remains compatible with PKUnzip 2.04g and FDNPKG. Supposing that other ARCHIVER/* formats were implemented by the FreeDOS packaging system, the cdrom.iso size could be: 627,403,406 bytes, ARJ (-jm) 557,334,645 bytes, ZIP/BZ2 (-9) 495,380,042 bytes, RAR2 (-m5 -mdE -mm) 449,729,467 bytes, 7Z/LZMA2 (-mx9 -ms=on -mqs=on -md=1m) UnRAR 2.50 is particularly impressive because it is 16-bit, fast, and will extract on an 8088 with 640KB of memory. It also has an output size competitive with the kind of 7-Zip 19 archive that can be extracted by 7ZDEC. For fun, I also replaced SLICER with RAR and reduced the number of installation floppies from eight to three. These repacked floppy images are also in the linked folder.
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