On 05 July 2000, Bastian Kleineidam said:

I remember the question if zlib is always included in Python installations? Well its not in Debian until you install the python-zlib package. So you have to include this package to the requirements for Debian Linux.

But zlib is really only needed on Windows, where we create ZIP files from scratch (ie. using zipfile.py and zlib -- not through spawning an external zip utility). On Unix, we generally rely on external utilities (zip, gzip, tar, ...) for that sort of thing.

However, having python-zlib installed shouldn't hurt! ;-)

Greg