I wonder how hard it would be to modify TeX (or kpathsea, whatever) to load its libraries out of a single compressed tarball or fast database of some kind. See

I wonder how hard it would be to modify TeX (or kpathsea, whatever) to load its libraries out of a single compressed tarball or fast database of some kind. Seeing as TeX libraries are text files, I do find it surprising that they don't compress better. Is it mostly the fonts and documentation taking up all that space?