From: Jon Smirl Date: Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:10:39 GMT Subject: Re: A look at some alternative PACK file encodings Message-ID: <9e4733910609061710x4fb48d86o58b9c5ec8e527135@mail.gmail.com> In-Reply-To: On 9/6/06, Linus Torvalds wrote: > Is there any way to get zlib to just generate a suggested dictionary from > a given set of input? No, I asked the author. Apparently it is a hard problem, there have been research papers written about it. Shawn has a Perl script that makes a guess at a dictionary. That scripts gets 4-7% improvement. The number one thing that ended up in the Mozilla dictionary was the five different license versions that had each been copied into 50,000 files over time. I think what happens in practice is that when people get to the point of trying to optimize zlib dictionaries they switch compression methods. -- Jon Smirl jonsmirl@gmail.com