[daisy] downloads - reducing filesize

[Andreas Deininger]

2006/9/8, Steven Noels <stevenn at outerthought.org>:
> Hi all,
>
> For those of you wondering: we decided to switch over to Sourceforge
> as a software distribution service (for official releases).
>
> That means world-wide mirrored downloads and hopefully faster
> download speeds for you.

I appreciate the move to sourceforge. However, even with potential
faster download rates, we should try to keep the daisy downloads as
small as possible IMHO. While working on the windows installer, I
realized that there is still a great potential to reduce the file size
of the daisy downloads, so I started to think whether we could have
that effect for the existing download files, too. My proposal/idea
would be to additionally offer daisy in form of a self extracting
archive, which would result in a remarkably reduced file size for the
download, without any negative side effects, AFAICS.

These are the results of some my efforts so far:

daisy-1.5.zip: 61.819 KB

Self extracting windows archive, created with 7-Zip
(http://www.7-zip.org) and UPX (http://upx.sourceforge.net) (both
licensed under the GNU GPL):

daisy-1.5.exe: 44.277 KB, which is 71,6 % from the original filesize only.

UPX is supposed to work with unix derivates also, so we might be able
to get that file size reduction that for Linux Users, too. If I get a
positive feedback on my proposal, I'm willing to   figure that out,
too.

WDYT?

Regards
Andreas