D Installler

[Daniel Keep]

Lutger wrote:
> Lester L. Martin II wrote:
>> Dear Mr. Keep,
>> I believe 7z to be much better than the ones you described as it has
>> better compression although I haven't look at zip and tar and
>> compression methods that deeply. I've always judged compression by how
>> small it gets my files.  The way you judge it seems to be more
>> interesting.
>> Lester L. Martin II
>> Daniel Keep Wrote:
>>
> 
> While 7z is a great compression format, (de)compressing is much slower
> than the zlib codec. Furthermore, 7z is LGPL and zlib has a BSD style
> license. tar doesn't do compression by itself, it's for archiving only.

Well, I *did* say "Zip", "tar" and "7z" as opposed to "DEFLATE/zlib",
"bzip2" and "LZMA".  I've noticed lots of people tend to confuse archive
and compression formats.  :3

Incidentally, Tango now supports zlib (used by Zip and gzip) and bzip2
(used by, surprise, surprise, bzip2) as compression filters.

<rant id="second">

Now, I am aware that LZMA appears to be a generally better compression
algorithm, but the reason I haven't tried adding support for it yet is
because there doesn't appear to be a single "liblzma" available.
There's the official SDK which is written in C++ with lots of
Windows-specific code (which obviously makes it difficult to use), and
then there's a portable, independent implementation.

But, joy of joys, they're not compatible with each other.  *sigh*

As for 7z itself, from what I can tell, the archives themselves are some
kind of object-tree.  Frankly, that scares the hell out of me.  :|

Honestly, I've been tempted on more than one occasion to just write a
*simple* archive format for Tango.  Of course, no one else would support
it, which would kinda defeat the purpose...

Ok, bed time.

</rant>

	-- Daniel