Investigate reducing JOSM download size (from 5.0 MB)

[osm@…]

The JOSM binary download size is doubling in size every six-months:

Today	2009-07-07	r1741	5.0 MB
6 months	2008-12-26	r1178	2.5 MB
12 months	2008-07-28	r736	1.7 MB

A size of 5.0 MB is now getting big for quick/cheap downloading over GPRS. A quick look around and within the .jar, the biggest areas are the following sizes:

i18n/	Translations	2.4 MB (compressed)	~50% of .jar
images/	Icons	1.2 MB (compressed)	~25% of .jar

These two contain static, slower-evolving data, and so are likely to also be the most likely for splitting out.

Translations are the largest component and are currently stored as binary class files. Converting these to use text-files of some sort will likely reduce the requirements. Currently each original literal string is also duplicated in every translation (eg. the en-GB translation contains both the original "color" used in the source code, and "colour" used in the localisation. Additionally combining the final translations into a single stored file would allow the deflate compression to take advantage of the similarities, rather than having to treat each language/class file separately.

[stoecker]

There is already a bug report about making a better representation and preventing multiple stored english, but nobody did it yet.