"H.J. Lu" <hjl.to...@gmail.com> writes: > On Sun, Oct 31, 2010 at 11:42 AM, Ian Lance Taylor <i...@google.com> wrote: >> f...@redhat.com (Frank Ch. Eigler) writes: >> >>> "H.J. Lu" <hjl.to...@gmail.com> writes: >>> >>>> [...] By default, the in-tree zlib is used. If you configure >>>> binutis using --with-system-zlib, system zlib will be used. [...] >>> >>> Can you summarize what modern platforms lack a system zlib, and what >>> justifies using the proposed in-tree copy by default? >> >> This is a good point. We need zlib in the gcc repository because we >> build it for the target, but this issue does not arise in the src >> repository. So this becomes a question for the binutils maintainers: do >> the binutils want to be self-contained, or do they want to follow the >> path of gcc and require additional libraries to be installed before a >> build can succeed? > > zlib is in similar situation as intl. We include intl in binutils src and > it can be disabled at configure time. For host zlib, should we check if > it is available and fail back to in-tree zlib if there is no suitable host > zlib?
I assume that the reason we do that for intl is because it has complex interactions with the rest of the C library, so using the wrong intl library will cause confusing behaviour when the LC_ environment variables are set. That case does not arise for zlib. I think that if we do ship zlib with the binutils, we might as well always build it rather than using complex configure tests. This is just my opinion, and really I think the more active binutils and gdb maintainers should decide what to do here. Ian