He even made a nice doc in wiki:
http://wiki.blender.org/bin/view.pl/Blenderdev/Blendgz
Usage: set the option "Compress File" in the main "File" pulldown menu.
This setting is a user-def, meaning it is not changed on reading files.
If you want it default, save it with CTRL+U.
The longest debate went over the file naming convention. Shaul started
with .blend.gz files, which gave issues in Blender because of the code
hanging out everywhere that detects blender files, and that appends the
.blend extension if needed.
Daniel Dunbar proposed to just save it as .blend, and not bother users
with such details. This is indeed the most elegant solution, with as
only drawback that old Blender executables cannot read it.
This drawback isn't very relevant at the moment, since we're heading
towards a release that isn't upward compatible anyway... the recode
going on on Meshes, Modfiers, Armatures, Poses, Actions, NLA already
have upward compatibility issues.
We might check - during the next month(s) - on a builtin system to
warn users in the future when we change things that make a file risky
to read in an older release.
1:
* when a blendfile gets loaded, paths are corrected with OS specific slashes (see blender.c)
* made available BLI_char_switch(char *string, char from, char to)
* made available BLI_clean(char *string);. This function should be called whenever you're doing path stuff, so paths are correctly saved, and thus avoiding other path functions stopping to work
2:
* relative paths work now in sequencer too (due to slash mess that didn't work all too well).
Now uses 'Application Data/Blender Foundation/Blender' instead of old
"Not A Number" dir.
- Updated windows installer to make this change transparent for the
users. It copies /.blender to the new location and displays a short
message to advise them of the change
(http://homepages.nildram.co.uk/~aphex/installer_msg.jpg).
- Installer also includes fix for opening blend files from explorer (patch provided by Valentin Ungureanu (vung) - thanks!)
Note to CVS users on Win2k/XP: Although blender will continue to work
without changes, you should ideally copy the /.blender dir to
<app data>/Blender Foundation/Blender for the sake of correctness :)
who have set a %HOME% environment var now works again.
Patch provided by Bill Baxter, plus an additional fix for Win9x.
There is still work to be done with this after the 2.32 release...
(the first save didn't store paths or font settings!)
This is something I broke back at 2.28a :)
I'm suprised there were no bug reports on this, but it's fixed now! ;)
Blender no longer uses the windows dir as %HOME%
This also fixes the ".blanguage not found" errors when
double-clicking .blend files. (Win32)
Needs testing at Win2k/XP!!!