Hi Jerome and Darik,
1. Unzip each FDN package. 2. Further unpack each ZIP and 7Z source file. 3. Zip+Store each SOURCES/* tree like it has LFN. 4. Rezip each FDN package like usual. 5. Optimize each package with AdvanceCOMP.
I suggest a much shorter algorithm: Simply apply advzip with the "recompress" option to the ZIP files :-) Without unpacking them and zipping them again etc. Also, the advcomp/advmame tools can be configured to put extreme effort in compression, but from my experience with advpng, you already get most of the possibe disk space reduction at medium settings :-) It is interesting that you also got savings with arj and bz2-zip, but ZIP in the DOS compatible variety (people with ancient PKZIP may enjoy the ability to unzip without having to use INFOZIP) I would not "overdo" things. Also, UNZIP can work on old hardware with low RAM, which LZMA or BZIP style algorithms do not necessarily offer. As far as I remember, there may have been a license issue behind not using RAR, but others may know more on that point. You can do mass-recompression of ZIP files with advzip with your favorite shell (BASH for example) so it does not take much effort to recompress the whole repository once. I propose to use ZIP -o on each file afterwards to reset the timestamps to the newest timestamp of the contents, though! Of course before this is done on the whole repo, somebody with PKUNZIP2 has to volunteer to tell us whether an example advzipped ZIP is still fully compatible. As far as I remember, this was one of the design goals of advcomp, so I am optimistic. About the diskette edition: One question probably is whether you want to use DOS from floppy or whether you want to install it to harddisk. In the latter case, you could just put everything into one tar or 7z with global (not per-file) compression applied to have the smallest number of install disks, but you would have less flexibility that way. And with floppy, it is better when a broken sector only lets installation of one of many zips fail instead of a whole install. However, I do not think that ANYBODY has drives with less than 360k capacity. In particular, the last time I touched a PC with 360k-only drives, it did not have any harddisk, so you would not need any type of installer to run there either. Regards, Eric _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
