Re: zlibish problems with cvs gnome-libs

[John Kennedy <jk csuchico edu>]

[Gleef <dzol@virtual-yellow.com>]
>  This is certainly a Frequently Asked Question, but it doesn't appear
>  to be in the FAQ.  Many distributions stash an old copy of libz in
>  /usr/X11R6/lib. ...

  As I said I would in one of my earlier messages, I recompiled
XFree86-3.3.3 after defining HasZlib to YES in config/cf/xf86site.def.
It happily picked up the dynamic libz (from zlib-1.1.3 in my case,
configured with --prefix=/usr so you don't have to mess with X to get
it found easily) and appears to be using it quite happily.

  Defining HasZlib tells X that you already have one and it doesn't
have to make its own subset (with the same name) from what I could find.

  I was a little worried it might be something like `xv' that was
configured with Imake that might have slipped it in there, but just
changing the HasZlib in X made it disappear.

  GNOME happened to be the first program I compiled that was using X
and compression in the same package that managed to have /usr/X11R6/lib
instead of my provided library search path.  That made things more fun.  (:

  If you can't recompile from sources, just gzip or delete the thing.
If it was dynamic I'd worry a little bit more, but compressing the static
library isn't going to hurt anything after the build.

>  ... The solution is to remove all old versions of libz, so that you
>  are left with only the libz from zlib version 1.1.2.  Then rerun
>  ldconfig.

  In my case, there was no dynamic libz.so, just a libz.a, even though
the rest of X11 was compiled and had dynamic libraries.  That helps
libz.a slip under the radar of a lot of people.

>  This should not cause problems with programs linked against the old
>  libz, all the ones I've tried or heard about will happily run with
>  the newer libz.

  Since that was probably intended by X to just be used by it for its
fonts and is static to boot, that shouldn't hurt.  In any case, X seems
happy using the libz from zlib-1.1.3.  It looks like it gets used for
fonts, so I probably would have tripped over any problems by now.

								--- john