Re: Portability and distribution with Gtk+ 1.3

[Arnaud Charlet <charlet ACT-Europe FR>]

> Well, with AbiWord, we require zlib to compile AbiWord.  So, either
> the platform uses the source we provide (compiling on Windows), or
> uses a shared library (compiling on Linux).  Fortunately, zlib
> compiles on every platform we've tried so far.  As does libpng, for
> that matter, for which we do that same thing.  
> 
> So you neednt worry about the portability of this code.  

I'm sorry for insisting, but we might not have the same notion of portability
and usability.

By portability I mean at least most unixes and windows.
Most unixes here is different than simply Linux when it comes to shared
libraries.

Also, again, I have seen no provision for automatic configure nor shared
library build in zlib, so I guess this issue is handled outside zlib for
each different software (abiword, mozilla, ...) and this is what worries
me since it makes building gtk much less robust and portable.

So to state it differently, I am not worried about the portability of the
code in zlib which is certainly very portable, but I am worried about the
portability of the zlib *package* whcih provides very little support for
automatic build. Or I am looking at the wrong/an old zlib package.

Arno