[Zlib-devel] zlib 1.2.1 released!

[Cosmin Truta]

Hi,

Mark, thank you very much for the latest and greatest release :)

I prepared some stuff, to be put on the zlib www page:

1). An archive zlib121.zip, available at
    http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cosmin/pngtech/zlib/zlib121.zip

The archive with the same name, prepared by Gilles, has no "universal
time" extra fields. The naked zip format has only local time, which was
ok in the dark ages of DOS, but it's not ok for the people who share
files around the globe and care about reference time stamps.
It's too bad that many zip programs don't create universal time fields;
at least the Info-ZIP tools do, and I made the archive using those
tools.

My archive is a little larger: it has 414352 bytes, in comparison with
Gilles' which has 396355 bytes. The extra space is taken by the extra
fields, and by a marginally weaker compression. (If anyone finds a tool
that compresses this a little better, that tool must have the ability
to store/preserve the universal time fields.)

I am not convinced that conversion of text line endings from LF to CRLF
is necessary in Windows (it's necessary only for those who use Notepad,
but that's so braindamaged, you can't even save a file without messing
with the file extension). But, well, I followed the habits used so far
in the previous zlib1XX.zip releases, and I converted the text files to
CRLF. I did this job, even though Gilles did it before, just to
double-check that the conversion was correct. The file contents of my
archive is identical to that of Gilles' archive.

A note to Gilles and Mark: the file contrib/vstudio/vc7/zlibvc.def
has a LF line ending in the middle of CRLF endings. All the text files
inside that directory follow the CRLF convention, even inside the TAR
distribution, so the easy fix is to just grab that file from the ZIP
archive. This can surely wait until after zlib-1.2.1

**

2). An archive zlib121-dll.zip, available at
    http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cosmin/pngtech/zlib/zlib121-dll.zip

    An archive zlib121asm-dll.zip, available at
    http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~cosmin/pngtech/zlib/zlib121asm-dll.zip

These are distributions in which I put the binary builds from Gilles,
along with the necessary headers, lib files, and some documentation.
By downloading one of them, a user has all s/he needs: the header
files, the lib files, the test files, and of course the redistributable
binary.

zlib121-dll.zip contains the non-ASM build, and zlib121asm-dll.zip
contains the ASM-enabled (ASMV+ASMINF) build. They are 100% compatible
with each other.


To Mark:
  I guess it's your decision whether to distribute one (be it ASM or
  non-ASM), or both. I recommend to distribute only one, and to not
  even mention about the other, because I think that binaries are more
  tractable this way, but feel free to disagree.
  In case if you choose only the ASM version, I think you should rename
  it from "zlib121asm-dll.zip" to "zlib121-dll.zip", which means
  "this is *the* DLL distribution".

To Gilles:
  Thanks for the builds. You forgot to include the .EXP files; some
  people prefer them instead of the .LIB files, although I'm not sure
  why would one want an .EXP instead of a .LIB. There is a USAGE.txt
  that explains how to use various files with MS and non-MS tools;
  with non-MS tools, one can convert either the .DEF, the .LIB or the
  .EXP into the desired library format.

  The "test" directory contains a few more executables for testing
  the DLL: "example_d.exe", "minigzip_d.exe", "testzlib_d.exe" and
  "untgz_d.exe". You also included the statically-built executables,
  but there is no point to have them in the DLL archive.

  Between the P6 model and the Blended model, I chose the Blended model.
  I did not have time to run performance tests, sorry. I just believe
  that Blended model with VC7.1 is better than a P6-only or a P7-only
  model. (In one of my earlier builds, I used "-G6", but that's only
  because I use VC6 which has the Blended model identical to P5...)
  The "-GB" option is the default in MSC, so I didn't mention it at all
  in the README file.

**

Good luck to the newest zlib-1.2.1!
Cosmin