Date: Sun, 14 Mar 1999 11:14:52 +0200 (IST) From: Eli Zaretskii X-Sender: eliz AT is To: Robert Hoehne cc: djgpp AT delorie DOT com, OussMan Subject: Re: (Fwd) Compression In-Reply-To: <199903131319.IAA06592@delorie.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Mailing-List: djgpp AT delorie DOT com X-Unsubscribes-To: listserv AT delorie DOT com Precedence: bulk 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 ;-).