Re: Better compression for the Windows installer

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 06:04:03PM -0700, Fyodor wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 06:37:36PM -0600, David Fifield wrote:
> > How does this sound? At the end of this message is the output of
> > makensis.exe using the different options.
>
> It sounds wonderful!  Thanks for testing.  As you know from our
> investigation today, the Nmap Windows executables are the biggest
> bandwidth hogs on the site.  I like the idea of enabling this on the
> Pcap installer too if it helps.
>
> LZMA is probably most famous for its use in the 7-Zip 7z format.
> Maybe sometime we'll distribute Nmap in 7z format too.  I just
> installed p7zip (http://sourceforge.net/projects/p7zip/) and here are
> the sizes for the Nmap 5.30BETA1 package:
>
> 41082880 nmap-5.30BETA1.tar
> 12965256 nmap-5.30BETA1.tgz
> 11273966 nmap-5.30BETA1.tar.bz2
> 10005965 nmap-5.30BETA1.tar.7z
>
> That is greater than an 11% reduction in the bz2 size for the 7z.  It
> almost even beat the 10MB mark!  Too bad my "tar" can't deal with
> it.

Try xz too. http://tukaani.org/xz/. GNU and Fedora, among others, are
distributing newer packages in this format, and GNU tar handles tar.xz
transparently just like tar.gz and tar.bz2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xz.

Here are my results. It's interesting that I got the exact same byte
counts as you for .tar.bz2 and tar.7z.

41082880 nmap-5.30BETA1.tar
12965275 nmap-5.30BETA1.tgz
11273966 nmap-5.30BETA1.tar.bz2
10005965 nmap-5.30BETA1.tar.7z
 9915080 nmap-5.30BETA1.tar.xz

David Fifield
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