Message-ID:	<32861315.73A2@ananke.amu.edu.pl>
Date:	Sun, 10 Nov 1996 18:38:29 +0100
From:	Mark Habersack <grendel AT ananke DOT amu DOT edu DOT pl>
Reply-To:	grendel AT ananke DOT amu DOT edu DOT pl
Organization:	Home, sweet home
MIME-Version:	1.0
To:	malcolm AT manawatu DOT gen DOT nz
CC:	djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject:	Re: Why not to use 'tar' before packing DJGPP?
References:	<199611100335 DOT QAA28548 AT papaioea DOT manawatu DOT gen DOT nz>

Malcolm Taylor wrote:

> > > You could put the compression straight into the installer itself, and
> > > hence enable the use of tar or something else without anyone having
> > > to be too troubled by it.
> > In fact, the installer encapsulates the ZIP Deflate/Inflate algorithm
> > and it would be fairly easy to add the tar support, as well as GZIP
> > (well, GZIP is there for free, the installer uses zlib).
> 
> I thought that would be the case :)
The easier the faster!! ;-))

> > That's right. Such a switch would take some time. Besides, I think DJ is
> > compressing DJGPP on Unix, and AFAIK there's no other common compressor
> > than ZIP or TAR on DOS and Unixes.
> 
> He does it on DOS. If there is a great need for smaller distribution
Yeah, I've just learned it;-)

> archives then I can throw together a good archiver for the job in
> less than a week. It would not be as fast as pkzip, but should get
> significantly better ratios without too much more time. Is there any
> interest in this?
Would you use the Deflate algorithm or one from RKIVE? I think Deflate
is good enough and with some improvements (bigger dictionary, treating
ALL files as one stream of data without clearing the dictionary every
time new file is read, sorting files by type - i.e. extension, creating
a complete histogram before compressing) it would give much better
results tan either ZIP or PKZIP. I think it is important to stay at the
ZIP file format so that all the tools still work with it. This, of
course, wouldn't increase compression ratio as much as a completely new
archiver, but still it'd better than the old, good ZIP. And of you
could  glue up a library of functions to do the compression, everyone
would only benefit from that.

> I could write an archiver getting ratios close to RKIVE while being
> quite a lot faster.
That'd be great.

> Does your installer use cwsdpmi.exe or PMODE?
cwsdpmi. It's safer and I know what to expect in case of problems.

-- 
===========================================================
October. And the trees are stripped bare of all they wear.
What do I care? October.
And Kingdoms rise, And Kingdoms fall,
But you go on, and on.
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