I have an enigma: somewhere between FET-7.8.2 and FET-7.8.3, the size of the tar.xz package increased from 11.9 MiB to 12.8 MiB. I checked and the difference appeared on 27 March 2026, out of nowhere, because the size of the files is nearly the same.
Could it be because of an update of the operating system programs?
Maybe extract FET-7.8.2 and compress it again. If you think the update of the OS is the reason, then then new compressed FET-7.8.2 should be larger too.
I will try and search myself now.
I guess the reason are the many new example and test files.
I put on a temporary link: https://lalescu.org/fet/ (I'll remove it soon), the position where this difference appeared. No new files, only slightly modified ones.
I tried to pack again the small file, it was even smaller.
Maybe they use in their algorithm somewhere an sorting function or hash that is not always exactly the same? I remember that we had "similar" problems some time ago in FET, so that it produced different timetables even with the same seed.
I read that you can avoid that problem by using the "--reproducible" flag.
Please unpack my two files above and pack them with "tar -cvvJf archive-name.tar.xz directory-name" on command-line and let me know.
i kdiffed. there are small differences in the archives.
the file sizes of the new compress files (compressed by me) are:
11.863.740 for the 20_22 file
11.859.196 for the 12_40 file
so my files are much smaller than yours. I use tar (GNU tar) 1.35
The algorithms i am using are:
xz (XZ Utils) 5.4.5
liblzma 5.4.5
This is really interesting!
I use the same tar version, but I think the thing that matters is xz:
goghi@localhost:~> xz --version
xz (XZ Utils) 5.8.2
liblzma 5.8.2