Curious about how well the much touted "bzip2" program works, I tried
to compress the US English JRE with it.

The results I got _seem_ to indicate that there might be a bug in our
InstallShield usage -- the self-extracting download is between 1.7-2.4
MB (17-25%) bigger than what other compression programs do.

I've always assumed that InstallShield compression was on par with the
rest of the industry. Either I assumed wrong, or we are not using
InstallShield correctly? (I know IS adds support files, but it can't
be 2M!)

Anyway here is the size data (worst to best):

    Uncompressed jre.tar 18625024
    InstallShield jre12.exe 9502956
    zip -9 jre.zip 7829903
    gzip --best jre.tar.gz 7829792
    bzip2 -9 (default) jre.tar.bz2 7190687

Could you please look into this?

-Anand.

Tom, maybe we should start using bzip2 on Solaris, instead of zip?

Ben, I don't know if netscape can pull this off, but removing the
     lib/fonts/*.ttf files bringover jre.tar.bz2 to 6.59MB.