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

[Paul A Norman]

On 23 March 2011 23:02, Stefan Löffler <st.loeffler at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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).
>

-9 was used with the UPX, might exist in some other compression software, I
do not know.
 -ex is the old dos pkzip command line switch for eXtra compression.


> 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.


Yes having simply told UPX to compress all .dll in the directory, the data
certainly suggests that - all reduced by around 60% to about 40% of original


> 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.
>
> That would be a bonus.


> 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 ;)).
>
> Thanks for the clarity in that.

Regards,
> Stefan
>

Paul
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/texworks/attachments/20110323/aa9cd3c2/attachment.html>