Zstd compression support

[ghost]

Zstd GitHub Repo
Zstd Homepage

I don't expect this to happen anytime soon, it's just an idea for the future. You'd have to port Zstd to Android or wait for someone else to do it.

[zhanghai]

Current the right way to do this with Commons Compress is to include zstd-jni. However, (zstd-jni-1.5.2-3.aar) adds an entire megabyte to the APK, and not everyone uses ZSTD, so I was a bit hesitent to ship it in this app - this app is just a file manager and isn't meant to be an advanced archiver app anyway (#193).

[ghost]

Current the right way to do this with Commons Compress is to include zstd-jni. However, (zstd-jni-1.5.2-3.aar) adds an entire megabyte to the APK, and not everyone uses ZSTD, so I was a bit hesitent to ship it in this app - this app is just a file manager and isn't meant to be an advanced archiver app anyway (#193).

I use zstd because of the compression ratio & speed; makes it easier to manage and store large collections of data. A megabyte is a drop in a bucket for me and I'd probably save a lot more storage if I had an easy way to use it, and it'd be really cool to have zstd in this app because currently no archive app on android to my knowledge has zstd support.
I can see your point, however it'd be very useful to me.

I have an idea, what if you made it a sort of plug-in app, that way it's a choice if the user wants to install it and use it within MFiles. It could be used to have a variety of compression types without bloating up the MFiles.
What do you think?

[zhanghai]

That theoratecally should work, but also requires inventing a plugin mechanism in this app.

[ghost]

Maybe taking a look at how other apps do it like Tachiyomi for example would be a good starting point?

[Vinfall]

I know it's old, but since this topic is also brought up in #872 and #957, can you reconsider it?

Regarding the size increase, v1.5.2 from May 2022 is 8.13MB so 1MB sounds hugo indeed. However, latest v1.7.1 is 12.1MB already so maybe you don't mind adding another 1.1MB (latest zstd-jni-1.5.6-2.aar) to the APK?

[zhanghai]

@Vinfall I thought zstd should be working now since I implemented #735 ? Could you please double check?

[Vinfall]

Weird, I think it's not working for me then. I'm using latest 1.7.1(36) F-Droid release and the tested .tar.zst file is compressed in Termux using:

PAR=blahblah
tar --use-compress-program="zstd -T0" -cvf proot-distro-backup.tar.zst -C $PAR/void .

A single file archive file.zst compressed using zstd file inside Termux does not work either.

Libarchive itself works fine on Linux & Windows 11 so I can't think up what's wrong with the linked library. Probably a permission issue due to blending Termux & Android? Or maybe it's the same as #804?

I can unzstd and untar the archive inside Termux so it's not really an issue. That being said, I'd appreciate it if you could add an option for using zstd to the compress menu Create archive if possible.

[zhanghai]

The support has been there for some time - it's just that the app didn't recognize the MIME type for ZSTD files. This has been fixed now and will be in the next release.