Re: HEADSUP: zlib updated [svn commit: r205471 - in head: . lib/libz lib/libz/contrib lib/libz/doc sys/sys]

On Mon, 22 Mar 2010, Xin LI wrote:

> A MFC of this update is planned, but we will have to make some rather 
> aggressive changes against the library and more testing.
>
> Please make sure that you have at least libxml2-2.7.6_2 in your ports tree 
> before even thinking about updating your ports tree.  Older libxml2 uses 
> some knowledge of zlib internals that has been changed in this update which 
> is known to cause problem.

While the update sounds like a good idea (as does moving to symbol verisoning 
for this library), I'm not yet convinced an MFC is a good idea given the 
compatibility issues you describe.  Perhaps you could clarify a bit the 
failure mode: this affects only people who rebuild their ports using exactly 
the same ports versions, but after having done an upgrade that includes this 
update?  It sounds like existing binaries will continue to work since they 
will reference the old library version?

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge