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

[Stefan Löffler]

Hi,

On 2011-03-22 02:14, Paul A Norman wrote:
>  [texworks] 0.4.0 Release - Congratulations Stefan and everyone involved.
>
> A good milestone reached!

Thanks :).

> 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?

Hm, this is interesting. Indeed, the compression rate in the zip archive
is quite high (and I didn't even use the -9 switch - I should add that
for the future).
At first I thought this might be due to some plain text parts
(resources, translations maybe), but those are fairly small, and after
all the Linux executable has only 4 MB. So I suspect that the majority
of compression comes from the libraries. I'll have to run UPX on the
linux binary to confirm this. If so, I'll have to investigate my MinGW
build process - ideally, I would prefer to solve this issue natively
rather than adding overhead (even though it seems to be small). But
we'll see.

BTW: the latest development versions, as well as the 0.2 versions,
didn't need those dlls anymore - they were all built-in statically. So
you can most likely scrap them (though checking first is always wise ;)).

Regards,
Stefan