On Fri, 10 Dec 1999 11:19:47 -0500, you wrote:
There were issues with zlib 1.0.4 and later ones. Also, many Linux distributions don't have the zlib header files installed.
Hm. I don't recall having any problems reported to me. I'd rather not include the entire zlib distri in the Python distri -- zlib is rather big. Adding only the Unix source would be cheating.
Minor data point on the importance of zlib. I spent a long time figuring out what Adobe PDF's "flate filter" was before I discovered it was the inverse of "deflate" (yes, there were loud sounds of head-slapping when I clicked) and discovered that zlib.compress() was EXACTLY what you need to create compressed streams in PDF documents. Being a Windows person, I naively assumed zlib was in the standard distribution everywhere, and subsequently discovered Mac and Unix users were not so happy. So if you want to make PDFs, having zlib around is very useful indeed... - Andy