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
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, 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.
-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zlib that is so out of date.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
