On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 12:02 PM, Harald Schilly
<[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On Oct 19, 8:32 pm, William Stein <[email protected]> wrote:
>> It's a 659MB download.  However, once you download and extract the
>> zip, the resulting files still only use 659MB.
>
> Just curious, is there any compression at all?

No.  I zipped it with

   zip -0 -r sage_vbox-4.1.2.zip sage_vbox-4.1.2

>  It might be worthwhile
> testing 7z (which you can get in windows very easy via 7-zip.org) - if
> it saves >10% of the download it might be interesting to consider as
> an option.

The files in sage_vbox-4.1.2 are already gzip compressed squashfs
images, so compressing them again should be interesting...

I just tried compression level 9 (the highest I think) with 7zip, and
creating the compressed archive takes a while. In the end I get the
following size:

657MB

compared to 659MB for zip.   I don't think it is worth using 7zip for
only 2MB savings, given that users will have to wait 10 minutes (say)
to extract Sage instead of waiting only a few seconds with an
uncompressed zip.    In fact, that extraction and install only takes a
few seconds is a big plus of this approach.

If we were to use 7zip, we must make it a self-extracting archive for
windows, or people will get too frustrated/confused (again).   We
could provide two versions of the same files: a standard tarball for
OSX/Linux/Solaris, and a 7zip self-extracting archive for Windows.

 -- William

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