Hearse - comparing bones file sizes between different plat..

Archived from groups: rec.games.roguelike.nethack (More info?)

I suggested to Alexis of Hearse fame that it could be interesting to see
some data based on the file size of the bones files on the Hearse
statistics pages.

Now I just checked some of the output on the pages.

Hmmm hmmm.

There definitely is something more major than I expected that differs in
how Windows and Unix versions do their savefiles. Judging by the
difference in sizes on these pages:
http://hearse.krollmark.com/bones.dll?act=versionstats&...
http://hearse.krollmark.com/bones.dll?act=versionstats&...

The same difference is apparent with Slash'EM (7E7). DOS files (for
Nethack/Slash'EM) seem comparable with Windows' sizes. Some random
checking for older/obscure versions seems to indicate the only major
separation point is between the Windows/DOS and Unix/etc platforms.

I thought it was mostly the endian-ness that differed between platforms,
but it seems that compression is also done differently (or possibly not
at all?) for Unix/etc. I seem to remember there being two versions of
compression - 'compress' tagged '.Z' or 'gzip' tagged '.gz'. Are there
still varying compressions used for the Unix/etc platforms?
The Windows files that I get locally have no compression tag (.Z/.gz),
and they still seem to be less than half the size of the others. Perhaps
the Windows version does some proprietary compression, or just doesn't
like to tag the files?

Well, it was not a totally useless idea anyway, just that comparison can
only be done between systems that have the same compression. Or I guess,
the only 100% sure selection method is based on actual (tagged) savefile
compatibility.

Hmmm, again... After rereading my ramblings above - I guess since Hearse
does some parsing of the files already, perhaps it already does
decompress all files for this. Then the decompressed size of the files
would obviously be a better candidate for comparison.   Or are there
other differences between the incompatible versions that will lead to
significant differences in size and useless comparison?

/Kristoffer


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