Using zip format for help pages, examples, etc.

[Prof Brian D Ripley]

On Tue, 6 Apr 1999, Martin Maechler wrote:

[discussion moved make to R-devel]

> >>>>> "BDR" == Prof Brian D Ripley <ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk> writes:
> 
>     <.....>
> 
>     BDR> Doing this proved relatively easy and quite fast enough. It will
>     BDR> appear in the next Windows version (rw0640, I presume) that is due
>     BDR> in a few days.  We just use unzip to extract a file and display
>     BDR> it. (There is a DLL version of unzip, but it seems unnecessary.)
>     BDR> Using zipped help is optional by package, and where selected (when
>     BDR> installing the package from source) zips up the text, latex and
>     BDR> example files. The space savings on a VFAT16 file system are
>     BDR> considerable (about 20Mb on my system).
> 
> Brian, 
> this will be part of R `proper',  not just the windows extensions
> right after  0.64, will it?

I am not sure about this. The gain is really only on systems with large
clusters, and that means Windows VFAT16, where small clusters are 4Kb and
clusters can be 32Kb (and are on a > 1Gb disc).

The other issue is licensing. I compiled unzip for Win32 and followed the
minimal allowed distribution as part of the binary distribution. On
source platforms the use of unzip would be optional, but with binary
distributions you would need to ensure unzip is available.

Is there any interest in having this on Unix/Linux platforms?  If so I can
very easily change the source code to search zip files if present.

Brian

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley@stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road,                     +44 1865 272860 (secr)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK                Fax:  +44 1865 272595

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