RFP: UPX (Was Re: reducing binary distribution size with UPX)

[Robert Collins]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: egor duda [mailto:deo@logos-m.ru] 
> Sent: Saturday, March 16, 2002 12:42 AM
> To: Robert Collins
> 
> Not that i'm against inclusion of upx to cygwin distro -- 
> it's a normal package like many others after all, but i 
> really don't understand why somebody would want to use such a program.

Very good points. There are some cases where it is definitely useful.
I'd certainly do some performance testing before using on often called
software - ie ash. But for something like setup.exe itself, download
time reductions would be well worth a couple of extra page faults at
runtime. As for mapping the image against the disk image or the
pagefile, I think it's back to case by case testing. Certainly I can
imagine that with a compressed exe on a NTFS partition, or a FAT16
compressed volume, that making the least random access hits back against
the .exe is more efficient.

Rob