Zlib level in JDK7

[Dr Andrew John Hughes]

On 15 February 2011 13:57, Alan Bateman <Alan.Bateman at oracle.com> 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 zlib that is so out of date.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
>

Yes, IcedTea uses system libraries for everything bar LCMS, where
local changes in OpenJDK mean we are still forced to use the in-tree
version.  There hasn't been any success upstreaming these changes,
though I haven't looked at LCMS 2.x.

So yes, that means we use the system zlib (currently 1.2.5 here), jpeg
(8c) and png (1.4.5).  1.10 will also finally remove the static
linking of libstdc++ and libgcc.  This was done back in the early days
of IcedTea as part of preparing OpenJDK for distro packaging, allowing
these libraries to receive timely security updates and bug fixes.
-- 
Andrew :-)

Free Java Software Engineer
Red Hat, Inc. (http://www.redhat.com)

Support Free Java!
Contribute to GNU Classpath and the OpenJDK
http://www.gnu.org/software/classpath
http://openjdk.java.net

PGP Key: F5862A37 (https://keys.indymedia.org/)
Fingerprint = EA30 D855 D50F 90CD F54D  0698 0713 C3ED F586 2A37