Comments on: Comparison of compressed archive file sizes

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:16:39 +0000

Ah, I see. You meant in the comparison itself. I hadn't seen your blog post yet. ☺

I'll be updating the comparison shortly with this new info. Thanks for passing it on!

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 20:11:51 +0000

Adium is particularly affected by this, of course, because it uses a lot of embedded frameworks.

Or it would be, if we used zip archives. ;)

By: Devin Coughlin

Devin Coughlin — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 18:44:40 +0000

Fritz Anderson pointed out on the darwin-dev list today that you should use the -y flag when using command line zip. Without -y, zip will follow symbolic links and include the files from them. The problem with this is that embedded frameworks have lots of symbolic links in them to help with versioning. So if you don't use -y, you will end up with three copies of everything in your embedded framework. Using -y brings command-line zip in line with Finder's "Make archive of" command. Adium is particularly affected by this, of course, because it uses a lot of embedded frameworks.

By: daniel

daniel — Tue, 15 May 2007 23:01:49 +0000

Don't forget that 7-zip can also do a mean compression of plain zip and bzip2, much like StuffIt, only even better and for free.
Repeating your test of compressing Adium 1.0.3 with p7zip 4.45 on a ppc Mac:
- creating a .tar.bz2 with -tbzip2 -mx=9: 11,267,731 bytes
- creating a .zip with -tzip -mx=9: 15,166,337 bytes

Except the .zip version is a bit useless as 7zip does not support storing Unix permissions, or Mac resource forks and the like (that can be worked around manually). Anyway, not a problem is you tar it first, like with .tar.bz2.

Of course this is a moot point for Mac software distribution -- .dmg all the way! Totally dumb and ignorant users will always find a way to nag you with obvious support calls, there's no solution for that. The best you could do is to do things the same way everybody else does, which is using disk images. Once a computer-illiterate user finally understands the concept, it'll be familiar to them from then on for any piece of software. Much like understanding a windowing system or how to click with a mouse.

By: Peter Hosey

Peter Hosey — Sun, 13 May 2007 03:06:53 +0000

Also, disk images still have the enormous benefit in that you can browse through their contents without uncompressing everything beforehand.

Simone: The post I'm working on addresses that. ☺

(Evan, if he's reading this, has probably guessed what I'm hinting at.)

By: Mark Grimes

Mark Grimes — Sun, 13 May 2007 00:59:33 +0000

It's almost too bad StuffIt does so well in this use case... people might actually walk away from the post suddenly embracing it.

By: Simone Manganelli

Simone Manganelli — Sat, 12 May 2007 20:34:57 +0000

Of course, the obvious problem with distributing StuffIt archives is that StuffIt Expander isn't pre-installed by default on new Macs and isn't installed with the operating system anymore. It used to be. So you might as well just take advantage of the fact that 7-zip produces smaller archives than StuffIt.

Also, disk images still have the enormous benefit in that you can browse through their contents without uncompressing everything beforehand. For StuffIt archives, you need StuffIt Deluxe to do this, and you also can't use the Finder for this purpose (as far as I know). This isn't too much of a big deal with small archives, but it's much nicer to use disk images because of this when you have archives that are greater than about 50 MB.