Packaging – How to compress for release packages?

7zip is a great algorythm, and my #1 choice for compressing.

Unfortunately, or not, it does not save unix permissions.

So one way would be to 7zip a tar file, like it is done very often with bzip2 or gzip, for a tar.bz2 and tgz.

Another way is to skip 7zip.

For MumPI 1.2 I did create pretty much any option there is (default compression ratio for all of them, using 7zr and tar on Debian) and thought I’d share compression ratios.

MumPI is a PHP web interface, so a lot of text documents, nothing more.

<th>
  compression
</th>

<th>
  size
</th>

<th>
  %
</th>

<td>
  tar
</td>

<td align="right">
  1,003,520
</td>

<td>
  100%
</td>

<td>
  zip
</td>

<td align="right">
  373,678
</td>

<td>
  37%
</td>

<td>
  tar, gzip
</td>

<td align="right">
  344,698
</td>

<td>
  34%
</td>

<td>
  tar, bzip2
</td>

<td align="right">
  329,183
</td>

<td>
  33%
</td>

<td>
  tar, 7zip
</td>

<td align="right">
  275,526
</td>

<td>
  27%
</td>

<td>
  7zip
</td>

<td align="right">
  274,068
</td>

<td>
  27%
</td>

As expected.

In the future, I will pack tar.7z for Unix, and 7z for windows.

Maybe tgz and tar.bz2 for compatibility.

But driving ppl. to use the better software is a good thing to do, right? 🙂

Interesting sidenote:

7zipping on windows: 274,331

7zipping on unix: 274,068

Probably because of different versions or sth.