Date:	Sun, 14 Mar 1999 11:14:52 +0200 (IST)
From:	Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
X-Sender:	eliz AT is
To:	Robert Hoehne <robert DOT hoehne AT gmx DOT net>
cc:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com, OussMan <oussman AT ifrance DOT com>
Subject:	Re: (Fwd) Compression
In-Reply-To:	<199903131319.IAA06592@delorie.com>
Message-ID:	<Pine.SUN.3.91.990314111342.18100W-100000@is>
MIME-Version:	1.0
Reply-To:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
X-Mailing-List:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
X-Unsubscribes-To:	listserv AT delorie DOT com

On Sat, 13 Mar 1999, Robert Hoehne wrote:

> I just have an idea to compress the files of the compiler : it's RAR.

This has been discussed before.

As usual, for every good compressor, there's one that is slightly
better and also slightly less popular.  So one problem is to agree on
what compressor is the best.  We never got past this point, if memory
serves me.

Then there's a problem of availability.  Unzip programs seem to be so
widespread they are either already installed on every machine, or easy
to get (even `djtar' from djdev202 does that).  For any other
compressor, we would need to have the uncompress program available on
DJGPP FTP sites.  This means somebody should test the uncompressor on
every supported platform and make sure it works reasonably well and
doesn't crash there.  We also need to know how well does the
uncompressor support long file names.  A Unix version of the
uncompressor is required as well, since DJ Delorie (and possibly
others) maintain the distributions on a Unix box.

Last, but not least, various packages are prepared by different people
and uploaded to DJ Delorie's site ready for distribution.  DJ doesn't
repackage most of them (and it wouldn't be nive to request that,
IMHO).  So this is first and foremost a matter of convincing all those
who maintain DJGPP packages and ports to use another compressor.  I
don't expect that to be easy, either ;-).

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