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Squirrel / Squirrel.Windows

An installation and update framework for Windows desktop apps
MIT License
7.26k stars 1.02k forks source link

Possible to add / change compression method? #620

Open Ivoz opened 8 years ago

Ivoz commented 8 years ago

I was looking at Atom, which as far as I can tell uses this project. For a code editor, its download comes in at a hefty 85MB. I noticed that if one decompresses its installer's contents, then recompresses the the main folder (atom-1.5.4-full at time of writing) using say LZMA2 instead of zip/DEFLATE you can get from 84.8MB compressed size to 48.7MB. That's approaching 50% smaller file size!

So I'm wondering if it would be possible as a feature request for this project for it to be able to use a different compression method such as LZMA2 to create much smaller installers?

anaisbetts commented 8 years ago

This isn't possible because we have to remain compatible with NuGet. While on full installs I'm getting similar results as you on the Slack Desktop app, on delta updates it seems to have almost no effect.

It's definitely worth thinking about, but killing NuGet compatibility (and by extension, compatibility with the entire NuGet ecosystem of tools) is a real drag. I'll think about it.

dessant commented 8 years ago

Related: https://github.com/NuGet/Home/issues/890

aplex commented 8 years ago

I wonder if it is possible to set zero compression level for nuget, so that the whole setup can be re-compressed using something like 7-zip self-extracting archive.

Re-compressing the currently produced setup even with highest-level LZMA does not give any noticeable improvement.