[Zlib-devel] zlib 1.2.5 coming soon to website near you

[Mark Adler]

On Apr 19, 2010, at 12:27 PM, Vincent Torri wrote:
> 1) On Windows, with MSYS/MinGW (that is, without specifying CHOST), during configuration, the output of ar, and nm is not displayed.

Why do you want to see that output?  On my system it's just an error, since those commands don't have a --version option.  On my system, ar and nm cannot exit with a zero status unless they've actually operated on something (there is no help or version option for either, nor for ranlib/libtool).  That's why there is a status < 126 test to permit running with error, but catching the cases where the executable can't be run due to permissions (126) or is not there at all (127).

> Are you sure that the test, line 32 for example, is necessary ?

The test on line 32 ( test -n "${CROSS_PREFIX}" && echo Using ${AR} ) is simply to only display the name of the "ar" command that will be used when a request was made for a possibly different name.  If no such request was made, then it doesn't bother to display the obvious "Using ar".

> 2) On windows, cross compiling or not, using ./configure && make, the name of the shared lib is still not zlib1.dll, but a .so file. And again, -fPIC is used. So there is 2 solutions: either you fix correctly the windows support of configure, or you drop it. But don't let it half finished.

Unfortunately both configure && make and win32/Makefile.gcc are half finished for different reasons, and it will simply be that way in 1.2.5, since the bug fix is more important than getting it all to work right with MinGW.

What I could do for this release is put in ./configure a message and exit for the "MINGW*|mingw*)" case to go look at win32/Makefile.gcc instead.  I would rather do that than to actually run that makefile, since it behaves differently from ./Makefile.in with regard to what functions it provides.

Mark