The dramatic increase of zip file or installer (last release)

Dear specialists! What is the reason for so dramatic increase of zip file weight (size)? From 13 Mb for Audacity 3.0.2 (and all previuos versions) to 40 Mb for release version 3.0.3, even 32-bit? All functions remain the same.

It now includes the user manual.

Thank you! Can an additional paragraph be added in future so, that to have a choice not to download manual, two variants of downloading? Because I don’t need it, I can view content online, as always.

The workaround is to

  1. go the folder where your Audacity is installed
  2. Look for the folder called “help”
  3. Inside that folder will be a folder called “manual”
  4. delete that “manual” folder
    manula location.png
    In my case the current Audacity is installed in a folder called “Audacity 3.0.3” yours is more likely to be just “Audacity”.
    Mine is like that as I have many different versions on my PC for QA testing.

Peter

The idea is not to waste time to download, unpack, install extra megabytes to the folder, make the installation faster, as before. It took longer to download and install.

We always used to provide the Zip version of Audacity without the manual so as to make the download smaller for people with very slow Internet. I guess the release manager decided that now that we’re well into the 21st century, that’s no longer an issue.

I’ve not got a particularly fast Internet connection, but downloading the Zip (with manual) only took a couple of seconds, and unzipping only took a couple of seconds. Downloading and unzipping was much quicker than writing this reply :wink:

Nevertheless, the loss in time is noticeable.

Really :open_mouth:
How slow is your internet connection?
How long does it take your computer to unzip the file?

One more question. I show the way, where to extract:
C:\audacity
The installer doesn’t obey and extracts to the folder with the name about:
C:\audacity\audacity3.0.3
It creates an extra unwanted subfolder. Please, correct!

I didn’t count, each of steps takes about 30 sec, earlier - about 5 sec.

No, that will not be “corrected”. It is a bad idea to create Zip archives with lots of files in the root. “Best practice” is to have a single folder as the root and all of the contents inside that folder.

Example of why it’s a bad idea to put all of the contents directly into the root of the archive:
Imagine if you extracted directly into C:\Users\Fred\Documents\ and you already had hundreds of files in C:\Users\Fred\Documents. It would be a mess.

Wow, that’s slow. How old is your computer? Are you almost out of disk space? Is your computer critically low on RAM?

My notebook (laptop) is 2019 year of production, these’s more than enough free space. It takes a long time to unpack. Why is this manual pushed, though we never had and asked it before?

Firstly, it wasn’t my decision. If it had been my decision, I’d have kept it as it was before.
On the other hand, if someones internet connection is very slow (or unreliable), then it makes a lot of sense to install the manual locally so that help is available when you need it, without having to wait for images to download.

Personally, I think it’s convenient for newcomers.