Feature request: Windows ZIP Distribution

[Sigbjorn Finne]

Bulat Ziganshin <bulatz at HotPOP.com> writes:
>
> SF> That's an impressive reduction in size; compressing the
> SF> CAB file inside the MSI using the LZW-based compressor
> SF> that Microsoft provides with their 'makecab' utility didn't
>
> LZX (very different from LZW, born long ago, in 1984)
>
> btw, while writing this letter i compressed GHC 6.4 installation with
> cabarc. it results in 33 megs only (!). may be when you creating your
> installation, you are using MSZIP compression instead of LZX? or you
> compress with LZX:15, i.e. with minimal 32 kb dictionary instead of
> LZX:21?
>

Cool, thanks for trying this out, Bulat. When fixing on MSZIP as the
compressor for the tool that creates these MSIs sometime ago, I did play
with different memory sizes for LZX, but the resulting installers
didn't reduce space usage by all that much, so I opted to just go with the
cheap&cheerful MSZIP. This wasn't with GHC installers though, and as
your experience shows that fixing on always using MSZIP wasn't
such a good idea. I'll go with LZX for the next GHC release, as I'm able
to reproduce what you're seeing.

> ...

Re: lzma, 7-zip: I'm not questioning the improvements possible going this
route, just that I won't be doing it for now. Others are free to offer up 
other
distribution forms, of course. However, as an end-user on a Windows 
platform,
I do prefer using non-executable installers.

--sigbjorn