[tex-live] volunteer to implement lcab compression?

[Olaf Weber]

Olaf Weber writes:
> Thomas J Kacvinsky writes:

>> Eeek!  Seeking around in a compressed file is not easy at all.

> The cab works is that the files to be compressed are bundled into
> "folders" -- concatenated, really.  These folders are compressed in
> blocks of 32.  Among the data provided is where each file starts and
> ends in the uncompressed data stream, and to which part of the
> uncompressed stream each data block corresponds.  I think this means
> you can skip to the right block, start decompression there, and drop
> everything that comes before the data you want.  So random access has
> additional costs, but they are not crippling.  And you keep them under
> control by limiting the size of each "folder".

>> I know that it would be relatively easy to implement ZIP compression
>> in lcab, with the understanding that separate files go into separate
>> data blocks (i.e., no one file is split between data blcoks), but I
>> am not sure if the tools out there in *NIX land grok these types of
>> cabinet files...

> That would almost certainly be invalid under the CAB specs.

Of interest:

<http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=310618>
<http://download.microsoft.com/download/platformsdk/cab/2.0/w98nt42kmexp/en-us/Cabsdk.exe>

Latter is just a self-extracting ZIP.

-- 
Olaf Weber

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