M.-A. Lemburg writes:
There were issues with zlib 1.0.4 and later ones. Also, many Linux distributions don't have the zlib header files installed.
For example, on RH6.0, zlib.h and zlib.a are in zlib-devel.XXX.rpm, and zlib.XXX.rpm only contains libz.so. On the other hand, anyone who's compiling Python should really have the various -devel RPMs installed. I'd argue against including it, because it might cause odd versioning problems. For example, what if I have PIL compiled against zlib1.1.2 (zlib is used for writing PNGs) and the Python binary includes zlib1.1.3? There might be hard-to-debug problems caused by calling the wrong symbol. PCRE is a special case, because we've actually hacked the code a lot; it's not the PCRE code as Philip Hazel distributes it. Just received Guido's email suggesting skipping compression in archives; not a bad idea. You'd use less CPU, but might do more I/O because you're reading more sectors off disk. There probably isn't much need for compression when the archive is on-disk; Java needed it because of applets. -- A.M. Kuchling http://starship.python.net/crew/amk/ The NSA response was, "Well, that was interesting, but there aren't any ciphers like that." -- Gus Simmons, "The History of Subliminal Channels"