7z (Was: 64 bit DMD binary on the Mac)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Michel Fortin" <michel.fortin at michelf.com> wrote in message 
news:iudhf9$2dr9$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 2011-06-28 15:39:42 -0400, Walter Bright <newshound2 at digitalmars.com> 
> said:
>
>> On 6/28/2011 12:13 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>> Since most of the applications and most the libraries (basically all 
>>> that ships
>>> with Mac OS X) are universal there's usually no problem of 
>>> running/building both
>>> 32 and 64bit software.
>>
>> I'll explain the motivation for 64 bit only DMD binaries:
>>
>> 1. It cuts the testing time in half. This is a significant deal for me, 
>> as adding another hour to the test cycle slows things down a lot.
>>
>> 2. It speeds downloading the dmd package.
>>
>> The only reason to have a 32 bit binary is if there are x86 Macs 10.5 or 
>> later that are incapable of running 64 bit code.
>
> Well, you could ship the next DMD version 64-bit only and of you get 
> complains you bring back the 32-bit version as a universal binary.
>
> But you'll definitely rule out users of Apple's early Intel computers. I 
> think the last Apple model with a 32-bit CPU was the "Mac Mini (Late 
> 2006)", which was replaced mid 2007 with a Core 2 Duo model.
>
> As for increasing the download speed, you could try one of these too:
>
> * separate per-OS packages
> * separate source package
> * separate documentation package
> * faster server

* use 7z

Using 7z instead of zip or tarballs has shrunk the size of my packaged 
Goldie releases down to roughly one-quarter the size of a zip or tar.bz2 
(Yes, ~75% decrease is size). Of course, that's probably an extreme case, 
but I just tried making a 7z of DMD 2.053, and it came out to just under 9MB 
(vs just over 15MB for the official zip release), so fairly close to half 
the size. Still pretty damn good.

And I really see no reason why any programmer shouldn't have a 7z-capable 
extractor these days. Heck, it's pretty typical on Linux, and it's built 
into WinRar. Zip and tarballs are like MP3's: They're still everywhere, but 
only because of inertia, not because of any inherent merit, of which there 
really isn't any. 7z is like moving to Vorbis (Except that I think 7z 
support is probably more common than Vorbis support, which is unfortunate 
for Vorbis fans like me, but that's even more OT...).