coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Eric Schultz <wwahammy@xxxxxxxxx>]

In my experience with simple MSIs that I've zipped, you don't gain very much
since the actual files are already compressed. I think custom actions are
uncompressed so to the best of my knowledge that'd be the largest
non-compressed portion of the MSI. In our case though, we have a single
custom action DLL that is designed to be small to start off with. If we
added another custom action DLL to decompress the other we'd probably just
offset any savings we'd gain.

Eric

On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 1:39 PM, Garrett Serack <garretts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Well, the MSI APIs won't (ever?) deal with compressed data in their tables.
> Our own metadata extensions could be compressed, but then we'd need to
> uncompress the data before using it.  And given that it's not likely going
> to be too big, I wouldn't worry.
>
> G
>
>
> Garrett Serack | Open Source Software Developer | Microsoft Corporation
> I don't make the software you use; I make the software you use better on
> Windows.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Olaf van der Spek [mailto:olafvdspek@xxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 2010 11:27 AM
> To: Garrett Serack
> Cc: coapp-developers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: MSI compression
>
> On Wed, Aug 11, 2010 at 8:08 PM, Garrett Serack <garretts@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
> > MSI files are actually Windows Structured Storage files (
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa380369%28v=VS.85%29.aspx).
> >
> > In order that older tools and OSes can read them, they really can't
> change the fundamentals of how the files are written and store data. I can't
> see them ever adding a compression layer on top of structured storage
> (they'll tell ya to compress it yourself before storing it).
>
> In that case MSI could (un)compress these parts, right?
>
> Olaf
>
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