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[Nate879]

UPX (http://upx.sourceforge.net/) is a utility to reduce the size of executable files. It reduces the size of dwarfort.exe to only 1.6 megabytes. Without UPX it is over 5 megabytes. This will significantly reduce the size of the download.

[Align]

Is <4 MB really all that significant nowadays?

[Tahin]

For people on dialup? Definitely. Still, I don't really see the point.

[Draco18s]

Even back when I was on dialup anything under 10 megs was fair game, depending on how long I had (really, it was all about duration, if I could get it before I needed to get off I could download it--but 30 minutes was my patience limit if I wanted something NOW, which equates to about 7 to 10 megs).

[SeaBee]

Might save on bandwidth costs a bit. No idea what kind of hosting deal Toady has, though, so it may well be a moot point as he may have a huge limit that is in no danger of being reached anytime soon. UPX is cool stuff, though, and that is a considerable reduction in size! Multiply it by a few thousand downloads if you don't agree. 

[Lazer Bomb]

This sounds like a good idea, but are there any problems related to using this tool? Does it mess up the code or is there some "un-zipping" required?

[Nate879]

I used this tool on my own copy of Dwarf Fortress, and it didn't cause any problems.

[Sean Mirrsen]

I vote against it, simply because it might no longer be possible to scan through the exe to see all the possible (and possibly unused) modding tags. Toady has mirrors for reducing total traffic, and all in all, 5 megs isn't much of a download for a dial-up user. A better way to save bandwidth is downloading the "small" version without music.

[Mikademus]

A saving of 2/3rds is significant, taken bandwidth in total. Also, UPX'ed .exes can be unpacked (it's like running unzip), so a text file with instructions how to do it would solve the previous posters concern.

[Toady One]

I remember an email about this, but I don't remember the details -- are programs like Wine affected by this?  With the mirrors and no release, I was still up around 40% bandwidth last month, so options like this are looking more attractive.

[bartavelle]

If UPX can pack it, your archiving program should pack it better. UPX programs have high entropy and obviously will not compress well. Sure the .exe on drive will be smaller, but what's the point?

[Mikademus]

Last poster is absolutely right. If DF is downloaded as an archive then there's no benefit whatsoever in UPX-packing the executable. If it is downloaded as a .exe installer then there might be significant benefits. Afaik there should be problems with Wine since UPX'ed executables contains their own expansion code.

[Jeon]

dwarfort.exe currently takes up 2.1 mb of the archive download so that would be 0.5 mb of savings by using UPX on it first.

While I'm not personally a fan of using other formats, max compression .rar yields a 4.7mb archive; .7z yields 4.4mb archive; .cab yields 4.6mb archive; .arc yields 4.5mb (dwarfort.exe compresses to about 1.5mb in most of these)

Trying to compress dwarfort.exe with UPX gives me an error :/

[Idiom]

My vote goes to 7zip.

[Janus]

I remember an email about this, but I don't remember the details

Yeah, that was from me quite a while ago. 
I use UPX a fair bit myself, and I seem to recall testing a UPX packed executable in Wine without a problem.

I vote against it, simply because it might no longer be possible to scan through the exe to see all the possible (and possibly unused) modding tags.

This would be one problem. Another, I've found that some of the utilities (Regional Prospector or Reveal or something like that, I forget which) will also not work on a UPX packed copy of the DF executable. I'm not sure if they could be updated to work or not.