Could we use something better than zip for the dmd package?

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Andrei Alexandrescu" <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote in message 
news:jctqef$1ac2$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 12/21/11 4:53 PM, Walter Bright wrote:
>> On 12/21/2011 12:58 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
>>> Now, to answer your question: according to their website, WinZip
>>> starting with
>>> version 12 supports creating ZIP archives with LZMA compression - but, 
>>> of
>>> course, to unpack them you need an archiving tool that can understand
>>> such ZIP
>>> files. It's likely that such software is even more rare that 7-Zip
>>> itself, and
>>> will result in more confusion ("Why can't I open this ZIP file? I can
>>> open any
>>> other ZIP file but not this one...").
>>
>> I understand that issue. The idea is to support it, at least for
>> unzipping, in all new versions, and gradually that support will filter
>> out into the community.
>
> I repeat, this is a communal waste of time. I just downloaded and 
> re-compressed everything with 7zip, the reduction was not spectacular at 
> all - from 21.8MB to 17.3MB.
>
> Also I had to take the detour of downloading and installing 7zip for Mac.
>

Those results are all because it's difficult to find good software for Macs.

I just downloaded the 2.056 zip (18.8 MB) to both my windows machine and my 
(k)ubuntu machine[*]. I extracted it, and then recompressed to 7z. With the 
*default* settings, the default program on kubuntu gave me 10.2 MB. On 
Windows, 7zip gave me 9.6 MB. So, yea, good luck finding good Mac software.

[*] Why not 2.057? Because it's late and I wasn't thinking ;)

> We need to reduce the files going into the archive and get onto a faster 
> site.
>

I can't disagree with that.