Any reason not to compress Dolt with UPX ?

[Chefaroon]

Hello,

I've been using Dolt for awhile now, but only in a small setting, mainly for development purposes. I am mentioning this to underscore the fact that my experience with Dolt has been rather limited.

I started with 1.43 and I immediately noticed that the binary was not packed and it had a tremendous size. I often pack my Go programs with UPX since they get compressed a lot and I have not observed any downsides from doing that.

The latest version of Dolt, when downloaded and extracted via the official installer script, is nearly 100 MB and it isn't packed. When packed with UPX it gets down to just 25MB:

-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  99M Dec  13 09:31 dolt
-rwxr-xr-x  1 root root  25M Dec  13 09:31 dolt.packed

># ./dolt version && ./dolt.packed version
dolt version 1.45.5
dolt version 1.45.5

Are there any legit reasons to avoid using UPX on Dolt? If not, may I suggest implementing it to your packaging system so Dolt gets distributed to users in a smaller size, ergo smaller footprint.

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• For clarity, when I say UPX, I am referring to:
  https://upx.github.io/

[fulghum]

Hi @Chefaroon, thanks for the suggestion. I wasn't familiar with UPX previously, so it was interesting to learn about it. Seems like a neat tool!

I can definitely see the benefit of faster downloads for customers and shrinking down the binary size further, so this would be a cool experiment to try out. That said, we have not generally had customer issues with the size of Dolt, so testing this out may not be an immediate priority for us, but we can definitely track this enhancement idea and see if it gets customer upvotes. Thank you for suggesting this idea!

[Chefaroon]

Hey @fulghum,

I figured it could be helpful/useful, as long as it doesn't interfere with the way Dolt works.

For what is worth, I've been using UPX for years now (more than 5), with all sorts of Go projects, and I haven't experienced any issues caused by it. However, I don't think any of those projects had the reach/popularity of Dolt.

For the record, I vote for adding UPX 😋