On Tue, 2011-02-15 at 09:17 -0800, Xueming Shen wrote:
One of the benefits of using a 5-year old version is that it has been thoroughly tested by various software for 5 years, given we actually don't have lots of tests for zlib ourself, this is very important, at least for me, when considering upgrade, especially at this late stage
I can appreciate why you want to be cautious right now - but it is important that the codebase is regularly upgraded. If IcedTea have shown that 1.2.5 is "ok" then I'd say the risk is quite low. For JDK 8 it would make sense to discuss the pros and cons of relying on the system version of zlib. I can make the case either way though.
of the release I would be very cautious to do it. While the changelog lists a "long" list of changes from 1.2.3. to 1.2.4, most of them are in code that are not included in JDK,
So the risk is even lower then? :-)
the only thing that might bring in some enhancement is "Faster Z_HUFFMAN_ONLY compression for images and other specialized compression", but given my experience of measuring the improvement in the past, I doubt you actually benefit from it in most of the use scenario.
I'm not sure this is about any particular improvement - its really just about keeping current with someone else's codebase.
-Sherman
On 2/15/2011 5:57 AM, Alan Bateman wrote:
Steve Poole wrote:
Hi all, JDK7 is using zlib 1.2.3 (which was added to JDK7 back in 2009.) Zlib's latest version is 1.2.5 - is there any expectation to move to 1.2.5 in JDK7? It seems a real shame to ship JDK7 with a version of zlib that is so out of date. More than happy to help contribute towards making this happen. I would like to know if its already on someone's radar though or to understand why this is a mad idea :-)
Cheers
Steve I don't think it's on anyone's radar. Sherman did the last update, bringing us up from a patched 1.1.3 to 1.2.3. The main thing with zlib updates is testing and bake time. Have you done any testing with 1.2.5? While there are some good reasons listed in the ChangeLog, I'm curious if they translate into any measurable improvement with the zip APIs. On the testing it would be interesting to check if 1.2.5 is used by any of the distros as I think (but might be wrong) that OpenJDK/IcedTea6 project have changes to use /usr/lib/libzip.so rather than the snapshot in the jdk repository and so might already have experience using the latest version.
-Alan