[MinGW-dvlpr] Package archive formats and compression

[Aaron W. L. <aar...@aa...>]

Unfortunately I need to re-open this discussion.  As some people have 
noticed, I posted the GCC snapshot in 7-ZIP format as well as gzip.

The problem is that, even with symbol stripping etc, the GCC binaries 
are just getting really big.  I didn't realize how bad this was until 
now.  Also, several driver programs expect to be filesystem links, 
resulting in duplicated storage which greatly increases the size of the 
binary.

With tar.gz and without any sort symbolic links or hard links, the file 
is just massive.  I used 7-ZIP as a short-term solution, because I knew 
it would give good savings, but we need to think this out for the long term.

So there's two issues:

1) Address lack of symbolic links and hard links

Avoiding duplicated driver executables etc will save tons of space and 
decompression time

2) We need better compression than .gz

Besides 7-ZIP, rzip or lrzip may be particularly effective here, 
although I have not tried them.  I'm not actually sure if they have 
decent win32 ports, though.  bzip2 probably will not give good enough 
savings.  I believe baseline portable .ZIP is roughly equivalent to .gz.

No matter what we do, we probably should still continue to offer a 
baseline distribution in .gz.


What do you guys think?