Yes that's a funny stuff I saw only a few days ago.
In application manager if you sort by size, it really shows 406Mb

Is there a GUI in the p7zip package? I don't think so, but can't figure out why the program occupies 5mb uncompressed when my package is around 1.4mb uncompressed

In the 7zip forums on maemo, someone asked and the maintainer said he wants to do it.

whipping up a prototype in python that wraps the command line tool would be easy.

Yeah for you maybe.
Not for me

I guess i should contact Oriol, the project owner and see whether he wants to collaborate. I'm disheartened by the missing source and he hasn't responded to comments on his project page very well.

The way he has packaged p7zip doesn't make a lot of sense. The 3 versions of 7-zip should be in separate packages so users can pick and choose. there isn't a good reason to install all 3 when the platform is so memory constrained. I chose the mid-weight 7za for my package.

I might play around with a quick and dirty python gui, although this takes time away from my work on a scintilla based editor/ide.

just a quick update: I've created a very bare bones python gui with two features:
1. menu option to open an archive file and extract it to a directory of your choice, displaying any output from the 7z command in a window
2. double click on the file in the file manager launches the gui and prompts you for the directory to extract to (you would be disgusted to learn how much time I spent trying to get this to work -- damn DBUS rpc calls!)

I'm still testing and will post new debs in a day or two. I'll create two packages: one with the gui and one with the command line tool (this time with rar support)

Looking forward to a GUI version, would love to test it one it's available.

I'll take that as a commitment to test it

ok, I've setup a separate maemo project for the gui component, which I've named Squishee: http://garage.maemo.org/projects/squishee/ you can grab a file release there.

Squishee doesn't do a great deal at the moment (decompression only), but the hard work has been done (getting all the desktop icons and dbus stuff working correctly) and I'll add features over the coming weeks.

Technically the file release is an OS2007 package, but as it is pure python, I think it should also work on OS2008 (unless there are changes to how the desktop files are deployed). However, for it to do anything useful on either platform you need to have the 7za command line tool installed (I'll support other tools in later versions).

For OS2007 you have two options: grab my deb linked in my first post, or go get the p7zip package from the maemo garage: http://garage.maemo.org/projects/p7zip/

I'll make an OS2008 package of 7zip when I have time.

If you get time to test leave feedback here or use the bug report/feature request mechanisms on the project page. Source is available in the SCM repository (but needs a tidy up)