[texworks] Call for Help: Testing

[Stefan Löffler]

On 2011-04-18 23:47, Paul A Norman wrote:
> If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, its
> probably a duck.
> On Windows at least,  with their Qt shading, this component look more
> like a button than anything else.

OK, seeing them as buttons that open menus/dialogs is understandable.
I'll see what I can do.
 
>
>     > I was looking
>     > through http://code.google.com/p/texworks/source/list trying to
>     > identify what else there was to check...
>     >
>     > Re-compression --
>     >
>     > I noticed http://code.google.com/p/texworks/source/detail?r=763#
>     > Hasnlt helped us much yet, did another check on latest exe ...
>
>     Yeah, it was just a first attempt, I didn't have time to look into
>     this
>     issue in detail yet. As far as (stable) releases are concerned, I'd
>     prefer to go with uncompressed files, as they don't change that often
>     (people don't have to download too much), hard disk space is not that
>     limitted anymore these days (we're talking about 21MB) and speed
>     is nice
>     to have.
>
>     For "daily" testing builds, OTOH, I agree that size matters,
>     and speed does not so much. Still, I'd like to investigate this first.
>
>
> 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.

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).

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).

Regards,
Stefan
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