[texworks] Call for Help: Testing

[Paul A Norman]

Yes, UPX actually has a go at the binary, where as standard zipping has
traditionally only been able to handle text type stuff.

Will attempt that at some point and get back on it.

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 :)

Paul



On 21 April 2011 03:36, Stefan Löffler <st.loeffler at gmail.com> wrote:

>  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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