I'll check this in but it would be nice if (WBNI) this used a mingw gzip library rather than calling gzip directly. That's a fair amount of work but I could resurrect the zlib library in winsup if necessary.
I wonder why setup is using gzip rather than bzip2 for the package files...
the setup tree contains its own copies of the zlib and bzlib trees; thue, they are compiled under the same runtime that setup is. If setup is a 'mingw' app, then so are the internal, statically linked libz and bz2lib.
I imagine that the reason Igor used popen and zcat is simply that it was easier than directly interfacing to the library. Perhaps that issue could be addressed in a later patch (along the lines of the compress_gz class, which also provides uncompression capabilities?)
-- Chuck
