[texworks] Congrats on 0.4! -- UPX-ing exe and dlls

[Paul A Norman]

 [texworks] 0.4.0 Release - Congratulations Stefan and everyone involved.

A good milestone reached!

I was in the process of zipping up my current installation as an
archive before unzipping 0.4 over it,  and noticed the relatively high
compression being achieved even by an older version of Winzip.

Looking at the download zip and at Tw's exe, I saw that it has come
down form 22mb to about 10mb in the downloaded zip.

So as we do portable work form time to time, thought -- what about
applying  UPX to the exe and dlls? So share this for any one wanting
smaller exe and dlls.

Using the -9 switch I got some great results, only two files I did not
force as marked below.

Initial start-up is just a bit slower, but then Tw flies along. Will
keep testing. Disk space saving is very good. 22.5 down to 8.1 mb on
TeXworks.exe alone!

Makes any future Tw plugins possibly more attractive.

I understand that UPX may work well for Linux executables as well if neeed?

Data below.

Paul

                       Ultimate Packer for eXecutables
                          Copyright (C) 1996 - 2010
UPX 3.07w       Markus Oberhumer, Laszlo Molnar & John Reiser

        File size         Ratio      Format      Name
   --------------------   ------   -----------   -----------
  22,503,424 ->   8,188,928   36.39%    win32/pe     TeXworks.exe

        File size         Ratio      Format      Name
   --------------------   ------   -----------   -----------
   1,416,008 ->    812,872   57.41%    win32/pe     iconv.dll
upx: jpeg62.dll: CantPackException: unexpected value in PE header (try --force)
    156,672 ->     77,824   49.67%    win32/pe     libfontconfig.dll
    427,520 ->    220,160   51.50%    win32/pe     libfreetype.dll
     43,008 ->     20,480   47.62%    win32/pe     libgcc_s_dw2-1.dll
    199,680 ->     90,112   45.13%    win32/pe     liblcms-1.dll
    336,208 ->    146,256   43.50%    win32/pe     libopenjpeg.dll
    160,256 ->     78,848   49.20%    win32/pe     libpng12.dll
    799,125 ->    417,173   52.20%    win32/pe     libpoppler-qt4.dll
   2,136,717 ->   994,445   46.54%    win32/pe     libpoppler.dll
    967,168 ->    412,672   42.67%    win32/pe     libxml2.dll
     11,673 ->     10,137   86.84%    win32/pe     mingwm10.dll
   2,286,080 ->   1,002,496   43.85%    win32/pe     python27.dll
   2,412,032 ->    923,648   38.29%    win32/pe     QtCore4.dll
   9,519,616 ->   3,749,376   39.39%    win32/pe     QtGui4.dll
   1,852,416 ->    602,112   32.50%    win32/pe     QtScript4.dll
    730,112 ->    212,480   29.10%    win32/pe     QtScriptTools4.dll
    398,336 ->    145,408   36.50%    win32/pe     QtXml4.dll
    235,520 ->     92,160   39.13%    win32/pe     TWLuaPlugin.dll
    116,736 ->     39,424   33.77%    win32/pe     TWPythonPlugin.dll
upx: zlib1.dll: CantPackException: unexpected value in PE header (try --force)
   --------------------   ------   -----------   -----------
  24, 204, 883 ->  10, 048, 083   41.51%                 [ 19 files ]

Packed 21 files: 19 ok, 2 errors.

http://upx.sourceforge.net/

On 22 March 2011 09:11, Joseph Wright <joseph.wright at morningstar2.co.uk> wrote:
> On 21/03/2011 19:52, Stefan Löffler wrote:
>>> Do you want new screenshots (I did the current ones)?
>>
>> In principle, sure.
>> I didn't do any yet, because I don't have access to a Mac (see also
>> below). I don't think it would matter that much to stay with 0.2 as
>> there haven't been that many changes to the UI. But updates are always
>> good ;).
>
> I think it's good to keep them up to date, if only to show 'stuff is
> happening'. I'll do a couple later today.
>
>>> Any idea what is happening on the Mac front?
>>
>> Unfortunately, no. But I definitely want to pursue that path. There have
>> been some encouraging reports on the list (successful builds), but
>> somehow the thread seems to have died after that. I'd really like to
>> have 0.4.0 stable Mac builds, though, and some easy instructions to
>> reproduce them, so if there are people willing to follow up on the
>> previous work, by all means (probably on a new thread). Of course I'm
>> willing to help in every way I can, but it will be limited to remote
>> diagnosis.
>
> My own attempts ran into the problem that I simply don't have the
> necessary experience. It's clear that building *distributable* binaries
> is going to be hard work, as various patches are needed. I will 'wait
> and hope'.
> --
> Joseph Wright
>