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From: "Stephano Mariani" <sk DOT mail AT btinternet DOT com>
To: "'Gerrit P. Haase'" <gp AT familiehaase DOT de>, "'Lapo Luchini'" <lapo AT lapo DOT it>
Cc: <cygwin-apps AT cygwin DOT com>
Subject: RE: RFP: UPX (Was Re: reducing binary distribution size with UPX)
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2002 19:29:54 -0000
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In-Reply-To: <10350499945.20020316153740@familiehaase.de>

Hi!

I have used UPX a lot recently, and have found it very useful; however,
I would not recommend compressing all binaries with it. Instead, to get
a good compromise between size and speed, why not just compress those
files that are the least used, and/or largest.

For example, on my system, the largest files are (not including dlls
since someone posted that they do not compress well):
gs.exe*
gdb.exe*
lynx.exe*
cvs.exe*
postgres.exe*
openssl.exe*
vim.exe*
dvipdfm.exe*
squid.exe*
links.exe*
pdfetex.exe*
mutt.exe*
pdftex.exe*
ld.exe*
objdump.exe*
as.exe*
objcopy.exe*
strip.exe*
bash.exe*
expect.exe*
omfonts.exe*
gprof.exe*
irc-20010101.exe*

Of these, I would not compress ld, as, and possibly cvs since I don't
want to incur a performance hit, but the rest will considerably reduce
the size with a minimal loss of speed :).

Stephano Mariani

PS: The UPX stubs are *very* fast anyway :)

> -----Original Message-----
> From: cygwin-apps-owner AT cygwin DOT com
[mailto:cygwin-apps-owner AT cygwin DOT com]
> On Behalf Of Gerrit P. Haase
> Sent: Saturday, 16 March 2002 2:38 PM
> To: Lapo Luchini
> Cc: cygwin-apps AT cygwin DOT com
> Subject: Re: RFP: UPX (Was Re: reducing binary distribution size with
UPX)
> 
> Hallo Lapo,
> 
> Am 2002-03-16 um 12:16 schriebst du:
> 
> >> We should not precompress delivered binaries (besides setup.exe
> maybe?).
> >> It will not reduce the size of the packages very much.
> 
> > We could maybe include in the UPX file also two shell scripts:
compress
> everything
> > and decompress everything, just to ease things to users.
> 
> It is pretty easy to type in: `upx /bin/*.exe`;)
> 
> Give it a try, pack it up and offer it for inclusion (UCL too).
> 
> 
> Gerrit
> --
> =^..^=
> 
>