[fpc-pascal] a suggestion...

[Пётр Косаревский]

> bzip2 has similar compression rates (except maybe for multimedia
> files, which isn't the case) and 7zip/LZMA usually compresses better
> than RAR.
> 7zip isn't installed by default in any distro AFAIK, but at least it
> open source.
> RAR would be my last option...

I tried to benchmark a little. Archivers were limited to 512 Mb. Timings only in the second test. Precision is kept 1 Mb/10 seconds intentionally.

There are many comprehensive benchmarks, but I tested nearly the last versions.

OpenOffice 2.0.2 sources, 1209 Mb (there are several .gz and other binary files inside).
(RAR and 7z had the advantage of managing files themselves to create "solid" archives, gzip and bzip2 were used on a 1209 Mb "ball" made by RAR.)

Rar (3.60 beta 2):  212 Mb
gzip (1.2.4):       276 Mb
bzip2 (1.0.3):      230 Mb
7z PPMd (4.4.2):    190 Mb
7z LZMA (--""--):   too slow (~100 Kb/s, more than three hours)

After that I tried to compress FPC SVN (153 Mb), and the numbers were in different order (FPC "ball" was created in 2 minutes by Rar):

Rar     21 Mb  5 minutes
gzip    29 Mb  1 minute 30 seconds
bzip2   20 Mb  3 minutes 40 seconds (is it optimized for pascal?)
7z PPMd 17 Mb  8 minutes 20 seconds
7z LZMA 16 Mb  25 minutes (well, it would be better, I believe it had memory problems)

I tried PPMonster archiver (open source, from the author of PPMd algorithm), while sources are less than 60 Kb in C, speed is often about 20 Kb/s. However, it promised 0.548 bits per byte of the FPC "ball" (but >1.5 for OpenOffice).

Naturally, there is still no good reason to change something.