ok,<div><br></div><div>Prob not really worth trying to UPX a properly constructed installer as you point out. It appears to possibly only try to UPX the stub depending on how the installer handles things anyway.</div><div>
<br></div><div>Did an exhaustive set of tests that I'll keep for other things as well, as a benchmark as there is actually a useful mix of different types of stuff in each Tw update, the worst culprit on Xp standard NTFS on disk, is the popler data - some disk wastage reationg to sector sizes, with so many small files.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Most of my tests involved extracting form the latest Tw zip and then re-compressing the deflated files with various techniques, UPXing and not UPXing the dll and exe.</div><div><br></div><div>The conclusion appears to be that a LZMA 7Zip self extractor can be made (10.7 MB) that is about 6mb smaller than the standard curent Tw developer update zip. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Or a straight forward 7Zip .7z archive can be made (10.6 Mb) that is also about six Mb smaller than the current development .zip (16.7 MB).</div><div><br></div><div>Also if the dll and exe are UPXed then a SelfExtractor (SFX) can be made with 7Zip that is still only 12.4Mb</div>
<div><br></div><div>Perhaps helpful for any one on slower connections and or using a thumb-drives from time to time, who is needing to keep up with the fixes.</div><div><br></div><div>What ever else, it all gives us some idea of available compressions.</div>
<div><br></div><div>File attached.</div><div><br></div><div>Paul<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On 21 April 2011 09:54, Paul A Norman <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:paul.a.norman@gmail.com">paul.a.norman@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">Yes, UPX actually has a go at the binary, where as standard zipping has traditionally only been able to handle text type stuff.<div>
<br></div><div>Will attempt that at some point and get back on it.</div><div><br></div><div>
Keep in mind though its not just download, on a portable type setup, once installed, every saved Mb tends to end up being useful at some point :)</div><div><br></div><font color="#888888"><div>Paul</div></font><div><div>
</div><div class="h5"><div><br></div><div><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">
On 21 April 2011 03:36, Stefan Löffler <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:st.loeffler@gmail.com" target="_blank">st.loeffler@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000"><div>
On 2011-04-18 23:47, Paul A Norman wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div class="gmail_quote">If it looks like a duck, walks like a
duck, quacks like a duck, its probably a duck.
<div>On Windows at least, with their Qt shading, this component
look more like a button than anything else.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
OK, seeing them as buttons that open menus/dialogs is
understandable. I'll see what I can do.<div><br>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);padding-left:1ex">
<div>
> I was looking<br>
> through <a href="http://code.google.com/p/texworks/source/list" target="_blank">http://code.google.com/p/texworks/source/list</a>
trying to<br>
> identify what else there was to check...<br>
><br>
> Re-compression --<br>
><br>
> I noticed <a href="http://code.google.com/p/texworks/source/detail?r=763#" target="_blank">http://code.google.com/p/texworks/source/detail?r=763#</a><br>
> Hasnlt helped us much yet, did another check on latest
exe ...<br>
<br>
</div>
Yeah, it was just a first attempt, I didn't have time to look
into this<br>
issue in detail yet. As far as (stable) releases are
concerned, I'd<br>
prefer to go with uncompressed files, as they don't change
that often<br>
(people don't have to download too much), hard disk space is
not that<br>
limitted anymore these days (we're talking about 21MB) and
speed is nice<br>
to have.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204);padding-left:1ex">For "daily" testing builds, OTOH, I agree
that size matters,<br>
and speed does not so much. Still, I'd like to investigate
this first.<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Its worth it, there are still considerable numbers of
people in developing countries who rely on speeds little
better, or the same as dial up modems. I know one man in the
Philipines who has been unable to guarantee a connection for
ten minutes without it going down and requires reconnection,
and have seen people in Fiji even near main nodes, have to
wait over an hour to process a small raft of plain text
emails.</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
<br></div>
Of course. OTOH, the installer already is quite a bit smaller than
the archive, so it would be reasonable to download that if
speed/capacity is an issue. Just to check, could you run UPX on the
installer and see if it gets (significantly) smaller? (My guess is
no, but if I'm wrong I'll look into using UPX on the installer; on
the one hand, it's smaller to begin with, and on the other it is run
only once, so any startup lag is no problem).<br>
<br>
In the meantime, I've looked a little bit into the issue with the
main TeXworks.exe. It seems that Qt stores quite a lot of
information on properties, methods, UI, ... as plain text in the
.exe. This, naturally, can be compressed efficiently, yielding the
much smaller size you reported. However, the files to download are
compressed in a .zip archive. Therefore, I'd suspect that replacing
the TeXworks.exe in the .zip file by an UPX'ed one would make only a
minor difference. The .exe is smaller, but it won't be compressed
anymore by the zip algorithm (right now, the compressed size is
about 50% smaller than the uncompressed one). So, again, I would
suspect the difference between an UPX'ed version and a non-UPX'ed
one in a zip archive to be small (though non-zero, as I expect the
UPX algorithm to give somewhat better results than zip).<br>
<br>
Regards,<br>
Stefan<br>
</div>
</blockquote></div><br></div>
</div></div></blockquote></div><br></div>