In the release guide, mention the AdvanceCOMP can compress gzip files better.

It's an option release managers (on *nix) might want to be aware of.

diff --git a/Porting/release_managers_guide.pod b/Porting/release_managers_guide.pod
index be55bcf..cff0d23 100644 (file)
--- a/Porting/release_managers_guide.pod
+++ b/Porting/release_managers_guide.pod
@@ -646,6 +646,19 @@ your changes were all committed, you can override the suffix with:
 XXX if we go for extra tags and branches stuff, then add the extra details
 here
 
+Optionally, you might want to compress your tarball more. Unix F<gzip>
+doesn't actually produce the smallest possible DEFLATE output. If you have the
+AdvanceCOMP suite (e.g. the C<advancecomp> port on macports), you can run
+
+    $ advdef -z -4 ../perl-x.y.z-RC1.tar.gz
+
+which will probably shrink your tarball by about 5%. Over the lifetime of
+your distribution this will save a lot of people a small amount of download
+time and disk space, which adds up.
+
+(7-Zip on Windows is the same code as AdvanceCOMP, so Windows users get the
+smallest files first time)
+
 =item *
 
 Clean up the temporary directory, e.g.