Re: RFC: Adding zlib dependency to libgio

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2009-11-09 at 12:17 +0100, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 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.
> 
> The API in question includes compression and decompression as streams
> (among other things), and is pluggable. Code to do automatic detection
> of compression type could easily be added.
> 
> However, having some level of support being guaranteed (i.e. a mandatory
> dependency) has additional value that something being pluggable doesn't.
> For instance you could distribute zlib compressed data (as file or
> linked into your app) and depend on all glib installations being able to
> decompress that data. It also means you can e.g. design file formats
> based on a specific compression algorithm and never run into issues with
> some platform not having what is needed to read the file.
> 
> Plugin-based optional compression support is basically only useful for
> best-effort decompression of "unimportant" document files. Thats
> obviously nice to have, but not as important as reliable compression
> support.

Could this be used by libsoup for websites that zlib-compress their
data?