[AstroPy] [astropy-dev] ANN: Astropy v0.1

[Sergio Pascual]

In Linux, is common to have headers in a different precompilled
package (zlib-devel.rpm  vs zlib.rpm in Fedora, for example), which
utterly confuses unaware users.

2012/7/10 Erik Bray <embray at stsci.edu>:
> On 07/10/2012 01:22 PM, James Turner wrote:
>> I'm just wondering about the motivation for bundling zlib. I
>> looked into that issue fairly recently (not exhaustively but
>> probably enough) and concluded that basically all Linux and
>> Apple desktop installs come with zlib. In particular I believe
>> the LSB requires it (though of course only certain distributions
>> follow that). Is ABI stability a big concern even for something
>> like zlib? Probably Erik, Ole et al. have a much better
>> perspective on this than I have, but I thought it worth asking
>> the question just to make sure there's a good answer ;-). Maybe
>> it's just one less dependency to worry about whether it might
>> break or not.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> James.
>
> I don't think ABI compatibility is as much a concern--I would think
> that's pretty stable (though I don't know).  Also I don't think the
> availability of the library itself is of as much concern on *NIX
> systems.  But on *Windows* it is very much necessary.
>
> Also, even if the library is installed, I'm not sure if the headers are
> always guaranteed to be installed.  My guess would be that on most
> systems the headers for zlib are installed by default (they are on the
> OSX machines I have access to), but I don't know how guaranteed that is.
>
> But in any case, for the sake of Windows support (sans Cygwin, mingw,
> etc.) removing it outright is a non-starter I think.
>
> Erik
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Sergio Pascual     http://guaix.fis.ucm.es/~spr    +34 91 394 5018
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Departamento de Astrofísica -- Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)