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LZMA SDK 4.42 for FPC (Announce)

posted by marcov, 25.11.2010, 11:55

> > That is true. So where is the tested LZMA installer?
>
> First things first. And obviously I can't promise I'll write one (though at
> least somebody else could fairly easily, in theory). But you wanted
> Pascal-written compression, not C-based stuff, if at all possible
It is always possible. C and Pascal map 1:1. Conversions are not always trivial though, and maintenance is a bitch.

But we are a pascal compiler, and we manage an all Pascal codebase (with only gdb linked into any core binary as non Pascal/Asm source in core binaries). To avoid maintainers to _mandatorily_ have to know 10 different languages and their linking habits, we require all pascal code. Basta.

A different, easier solution might be .tgz. While gzip doesn't compress that well, the "solid" aspect with the combination with tar might actually outperform zip in this case, without the need for a massive translation.


> Besides, LZMA is a
> huge improvement over ZIP, so it's far better than "squeezing out some more
> bytes."
For most users it only squeezes out out some more bytes, since they download a compiler because of the functionality, not because of its size.

The same amount of effort invested in the dosport itself would do much more for the dosport than say 40% reduction in size.

Of course also the difference in extracter size (unzip vs p7zip or whatever) must be factored in, snce that util is also provided in the distro

> > > Besides, guess what? Even your friends use it. :-)
> >
> > Probably somebody submitted it to them then :)
>
> We have those exact same xz utils ported
> to DJGPP recently, but as mentioned, you won't use them because they aren't
> integrated (but instead separate tools) plus not written in Pascal.
Correct.

> Feel free to change your mind, but I know better than to expect that.
This policy has been kept for 17 years, and is not going to change to reduce the size of the dos distro from say 30MB to 20MB. Nothing is set in stone, but to upset such long standing policies (specially ones with big consequences like this) the reasons must be very,very severe.

GDB is such severe case, since you don't build a multiplatform debugger from scratch that easily

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