[LLVMdev] proposal to avoid zlib dependency.

[Mueller-Roemer, Johannes Sebastian]

There is still one reason this should NOT be done:

If some other library which uses LLVM wants to use zlib (either the system version or one built by hand) we will have linker issues with multiple definition, as LLVM only works with static libraries on Windows. Unless LLVM uses a custom prefix for its internal ZLib, which would “only” lead to more binary bloat.

--
Johannes S. Mueller-Roemer, MSc
Wiss. Mitarbeiter - Interactive Engineering Technologies (IET)

Fraunhofer-Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung IGD
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From: llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu [mailto:llvmdev-bounces at cs.uiuc.edu] On Behalf Of Chandler Carruth
Sent: Thursday, September 18, 2014 11:18
To: Yaron Keren
Cc: LLVM Developers Mailing List
Subject: Re: [LLVMdev] proposal to avoid zlib dependency.


On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 2:15 AM, Yaron Keren <yaron.keren at gmail.com<mailto:yaron.keren at gmail.com>> wrote:
Hi,

There are very good reasons why packaging an external library is a big headache in general.
However, for zlib it's not so bad for several reasons.

1 zlib is stable, code and file format. The last release is 1.5 years old. Manually updating the zlib sources once or twice a  year is trivial.

2 For llvm, there should not be a problem with possible security exploits forcing quick patch, as long zlib is used to encode debug information coming from llvm.

3 gdb uses the system zlib library of which there are many outdated copies around, so gdb can not expect to have the latest zlib. Thus, even if we miss an update, it's not likely to be a real problem.

Yes, these are all good points both against blindly bundling such libraries and why for LLVM + zlib they likely don't matter that much.
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