On Fri, Jun 11, 2010 at 9:30 AM, Xaero <groundxa...@gmail.com> wrote: > I was wondering if there was any other way to compress exe's genereated by PAR
First of all, if you're generating an exe then we are talking about PAR::Packer, not PAR. An exe - as generated by pp - consists actually of a fixed part (i.e. it's the same for any exe) which is kind of "self extracting". The second part is a .par (generated by PAR) - it's actually a standard zip file. It contains your script and (most of) the Perl modules used by it (transitively). I think compression of the second part is fairly good, other compressors have other tradeoffs, e.g. slightly better compression, but slower extraction speed. Also there is no other widely supported "compressed archive" standard other than zip archives. By "compressed archive" I mean that you can extract inidividual members _without_ having to uncompress the whole shebang (a gzipped tarball is a counterexample). Now for the first part: it contains some core Perl modules (essentially PAR and its dependencies like Archive::Zip), a custom Perl interpreter and the shared libperl.dll (or such) that the interpreter is linked against. Neither of this three parts is currently compressed in any way. On Windows we're talking ~1.5 MB here, mostly for the perl interpreter and the libperl.dll. Steffen and I independently did some experiments that show that one can roughly half the size by simply storing it zipped (using zlib). Of course the self extractor would need to link in statically the uncompress methods from zlib, that would add ~40 KB (on Windows) to the self extractor, so this would be definitely a win. I have some experimental patches that can build the "self extractor" wit this modification and have it produce the same stuff as the current version. Since we can't count on that a static libz is available on the platform where you install PAR::Packer and pp (esp. on Windows), we need to - bundle the zlib source with PAR::Packer - modify PAR::Packer's build system to build a static zlib (if necessary) from these sources The latter has absolutely nothing to do with Perl, so we can't expect any help from Perl's module build system (i.e. ExtUtils::MakeMaker) for it. Fortunately, Compress::Raw::Zlib seems to have succeeded in doing this, so we might just steal their solution. But it's still the part that will consume the most tuits, so don't hold your breadth. > I've tried testing the -z option but it looks like it make very little > difference but the exe I'm testing it on is generated by pp -e "print > q(hello!!)" command. Which makes me wonder if the -z switch only affect the > .par part and not the entire exe? Correct, -z only affects the .par part which is rather small for the "hello world" example :) In general, the gain from -z 9 vs -z 6 (the default) is marginal. Cheers, Roderich
