Asking for a “compression slider” with a 0-100 range, when zlib already had compression levels 0-9, is not reasonable. It simply does not make any difference in compression/speed, and needlessly complicates the storage format.
The fact that he pushed it through, and was so satisfied with such an ad-hoc, needless hack, clearly illustrates that he’s one of those moronic clients who think they know everything better than the contractor and keep coming up with an ever increasing number of ridiculous and infuriating change requests.
He didn't ask for 0-100. He asked for multiple settings so the user could do a speed/compression trade off, but didn't say how many settings I should give him.
I tried zlib's compression level settings. Maybe it's different in modern zlib implementations, on today's hardware, but a couple of decades ago on typical hardware of the day the 10 compression levels of zlib really were clustered around only two or three performance levels.
I'm the one who decided on the skipping block approach, and decided to give him a percentage slider. I didn't actually expect him to accept that as is. I expected he'd test it at various settings, and pick out 4 or 5 specific percentages and ask me to replace the slider with radio buttons that selected those, and give them descriptive names.
But a lot of users like to have more knobs and tweaks on their software, especially their utility software, so my guess is that based on his understanding of the market he thought that his customers were those kind of users so accepted the slider.
