[Kstars-devel] Compressing the binary data

[Jason Harris]

Hi,

On Jul 11, 2008, at 2:46 PM, Akarsh Simha wrote:
> Hi
>
> I thought that we should be compressing the binary data and
> distributing it, and extracting it during install time. With bzip2, I
> was able to achieve nearly 50% compression on the deepstars.dat file.
>
We definitely need to do this.  I'm a little uncomfortable even having  
a 31MB file in the kdeedu module, but it's definitely better than  
74MB.  What if we do get objections to this filesize?  How many stars  
are in shallowstars.dat?  We could simply make deepstars.dat a GHNS  
file right from the start.  We could make a special page for it in the  
startup wizard that offers 1-click installation of the deep catalog.

> I think it would be nice, if we had only a 31 MB deepstars.dat.bz2
> that would extract itself into .../kde/share/apps/kstars/deepstars.dat
>
> Unfortunately, I don't know how to tell CMake to do that. It would
> help me greatly if someone could patch CMakeLists.txt to do this.
>

I don't know how to tell cmake to do it either.  I'll see what I can  
find out.

> Maybe this will have to change again, if we are going to move stars
> with magnitude > 8.0 to the Get Hot New Stuff tool.

I'm pretty sure GHNS will automatically unzip the file.

Jason