Re: RFC: Adding zlib dependency to libgio

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 12:01 +0100, Martin Nordholts wrote:
> On 11/08/2009 10:54 AM, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> > I've been working on some API for gio (more details later) that involves
> > having an API for (de)compression. Having this as a public API makes
> > zlib a mandatory dependency for libgio (and thus the glib tarball).
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Will there some kind of plug-in architecture so it is possible to add
> say .bz2 and .z7 support to the GIO level? If so, couldn't the zlib
> dependency also be made optional? Not that I see a problem with a
> mandatory zlib dependency.
> 
> GIMP currently has bad hacks to support transparent loading of .xcf.gz
> and .xcf.bz2 files and it would be nice to let this be handled at a
> lower level.

Yelp has a custom GIOChannel for transparent loading of gzip-,
bzip2-, and lzma-compressed man and info files.  I'd also be
very interested in a GInputStream that handles this for me.

There was a thread about this in July:

http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2009-July/msg00133.html

Alex, I'm not sure what your plan is, but if you're planning
some sort of GFilterInputStream to do automatic decompression,
I think making it zlib-only would miss the mark for what most
people would want to use it for.

--
Shaun