for the wish list

Hi,

I think there has been allready some talk about some (understandable)
problems when using exe compressors on togo .exe . I am thinking maybe D6
could include its own compression of image for togo? I guess even
rudimentary compression could significantly reduce size of togo
applications. It could be optional, since it would be adding some time to
startup, but I guess some classes of apps like littly utilities distributed
by downloads could benefit from it.

rush
--
http://www.templatetamer.com/

rush wrote:

> I think there has been allready some talk about some (understandable)
> problems when using exe compressors on togo .exe . I am thinking maybe D6
> could include its own compression of image for togo?

As far as I can tell, a ToGo .exe consists of a stub executable loader followed
by a gzip-compressed image file.

I.e. it's already pretty well compressed, only the stub is uncompressed.  (I
wonder if it'd be possible to use a .exe compressor on the stub /before/
deploying...)

E.g. one of my most trivial apps includes a large word list, I took a bit of
care to ensure that the word list was stored in consecutive memory locations in
the image before image stripping / deployment so as to allow most effective
compression.  The result is that the deployed .exe is smaller than the word
list that is embedded in it...

    -- chris

Chris,

Damn. It seems we've been "outed".

Best regards,

Andy Bower
Dolphin Support
www.object-arts.com

"Chris Uppal" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
> As far as I can tell, a ToGo .exe consists of a stub executable loader
followed
> by a gzip-compressed image file.
>
> I.e. it's already pretty well compressed, only the stub is uncompressed.
(I
> wonder if it'd be possible to use a .exe compressor on the stub /before/
> deploying...)

shame on me :)

rush
--
http://www.templatetamer.com/

"rush" <[hidden email]> wrote in message news:<cdbmbc$sjp$[hidden email]>...
> Hi,
>
> I think there has been allready some talk about some (understandable)
> problems when using exe compressors on togo .exe . I am thinking maybe D6

What kind of problems are you referring to? I did used CExe
(http://www.eskimo.com/~scottlu/win/) successfully for a simple ToGo
application before.

--
Regards
Hwee Boon
MotionObj

Yar Hwee Boon wrote:

> > I think there has been allready some talk about some (understandable)
> > problems when using exe compressors on togo .exe . I am thinking maybe
> > D6
>
> What kind of problems are you referring to? I did used CExe
> (http://www.eskimo.com/~scottlu/win/) successfully for a simple ToGo
> application before.

I didn't think this was possible (because a ToGo .exe apparently has some sort
of checksum in it), so I downloaded CExe.   And, of course, you are right -- it
does work.

Looking harder, it seems to use a slightly different scheme from most .exe
compressors.  It creates a .exe that consists of a stub that does decompression
followed by the compressed data, just like any other, but the stub uses an
unusually simple method to do the decompression.  It just decompresses the data
to a temporary file in the same directory (thus reconstituting the exact
original .exe), and exec()s it.

I haven't checked the source yet (I will because he seems to have a solution to
a problem that has been bugging me -- how to manipulate image resources in a
.exe), but I'm pretty sure that's what's going on.

    -- chris

"Chris Uppal" <[hidden email]> wrote in message
news:[hidden email]...
In D6 the image is stored as a resource, and this allows any PE tool (exe
compressors, resource editors, what have you) to be used. I tried an exe
compressor on it (can't remember the name, the GNU one I think) and it did
work, however it doesn't have that much effect because as you have noticed,
the image section of the .exe is already compressed. Also you have to
compress the .exe after deployment, since the compressed stub is not valid
for resource updating through the Win32 APIs.

Regards

Blair