Date: Mon, 11 Nov 1996 09:12:15 +0800 (GMT)
From: Orlando Andico <orly AT gibson DOT eee DOT upd DOT edu DOT ph>
To: Malcolm Taylor <malcolm AT manawatu DOT gen DOT nz>
cc: Mark Habersack <grendel AT ananke DOT amu DOT edu DOT pl>, djgpp AT delorie DOT com
Subject: Re: Why not to use 'tar' before packing DJGPP?
In-Reply-To: <199611100335.QAA28548@papaioea.manawatu.gen.nz>
Message-ID: <Pine.SGI.3.93.961111091040.2135A-100000@gibson.eee.upd.edu.ph>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII


On Sun, 10 Nov 1996, Malcolm Taylor wrote:

[...]
> RAR only tracks around 64K of data, try using WinRAR2.0 with a 1M 
> dictionary and you'll get much better ratios - eg. I compressed all the 
> DJGPP exes in my Bin dir with PKzip and got 4008690byte zip, with 
> WinRAR2.0 it goes down to 2483578. RKIVE gets 2022798 (with some 
> extra options). This is close to half the size with PKzip, and that 
> situation may well improve on the source zips. Note that RAR with a 
> 1M dictionary is slower than RKIVE though.
> I wrote RKIVE so I'm a little biased, but compared with zip it is 
> slow. It does use some fairly sofisticated algorithms, actually 
> modern variants of PPM (PPMZ) and some modified string matching. ACB 
> is about the best known archiver (in compression terms) but it is 
> best run on a Pentium as it is around 2x slower than RKIVE. JAR is a 
> new archiver (still in beta) by the author of ARJ. It has better 
> compression than RAR and is faster.
[...]

One question: is the source code for ANY of these slam-bang new archivers
available? I use UNIX most of the time, and I'm concerned about
compatibility because most everyone under UNIX uses GZIP or COMPRESS. One
good thing though is that you don't have *much* of a memory problem with
"typical" UNIX workstations.