Compressing complete.zip with 7-zip?

[Santeri Piippo]

I just found that the LDraw library on my laptop was outdated and downloaded complete.zip to install a new one. Considering that it's a zip and how LDraw files are all textual I wondered how well 7-zip would recompress it, and pretty well it did: the 36MB complete.zip reduced to a 22MB complete.7z (with -mx=9, i.e. max compression).

Maybe we could compress the complete library archive with 7zip and save bandwidth?

[Roland Melkert]

I just found that the LDraw library on my laptop was outdated and downloaded complete.zip to install a new one. Considering that it's a zip and how LDraw files are all textual I wondered how well 7-zip would recompress it, and pretty well it did: the 36MB complete.zip reduced to a 22MB complete.7z (with -mx=9, i.e. max compression).

Maybe we could compress the complete library archive with 7zip and save bandwidth?

A while back I proposed the same thing, but someone mentioned:

That would break a number of programs which use the file without unpacking it.

[Travis Cobbs]

I just found that the LDraw library on my laptop was outdated and downloaded complete.zip to install a new one. Considering that it's a zip and how LDraw files are all textual I wondered how well 7-zip would recompress it, and pretty well it did: the 36MB complete.zip reduced to a 22MB complete.7z (with -mx=9, i.e. max compression).

Maybe we could compress the complete library archive with 7zip and save bandwidth?

As long as complete.7z were provided in addition to complete.zip, I don't think it would hurt. However, I suspect that most people would continue downloading the zip.

[Orion Pobursky]

I just found that the LDraw library on my laptop was outdated and downloaded complete.zip to install a new one. Considering that it's a zip and how LDraw files are all textual I wondered how well 7-zip would recompress it, and pretty well it did: the 36MB complete.zip reduced to a 22MB complete.7z (with -mx=9, i.e. max compression).

Maybe we could compress the complete library archive with 7zip and save bandwidth?

As long as complete.7z were provided in addition to complete.zip, I don't think it would hurt. However, I suspect that most people would continue downloading the zip.

What Travis said plus unzip capability is baked into all the major OSs so beyond the data savings (which really isn’t that much of an issue) I don’t really see the motivation to offer this aside from pleasing the ocassional power user.