Hi,
There's some value in having a newer zlib release. There have been bugfixes,
documentation fixes, various improvements, and API additions. I'm not
sure how
much is backported to the OpenBSD zlib, but a quick glance through your
attached
patch suggests there's stuff that would be nice to have. Do note your
patch does
revert some OpenBSD-local changes to zlib. You should diff the older zlib
release with the OpenBSD zlib to see what they are and try to preserve
them when
rebasing on the latest zlib release.
But if you read the patch to 1.2.8 carefully, you would also notice a
good deal
of added portability code. Nothing too exciting has happened in the zlib
world
the past decade, except the addition of more portability to support even
more
awful systems. It's basically the OpenSSL approach to portability gone
worse.
Not all of it is worth having, some of it is undesirable.
I think it's a better idea to go through the patch manually and pick out the
desirable changes and apply them. Or, as Joerg suggests, just patch the
port to
be compatible with older zlib releases if possible.
Recently I got fed up with the awful code quality of upsteam zlib, so I
fetched
1.2.8 and removed support for awful systems line by line, converting it
to nice
standard C, not zlib-C. The result was a great deal simpler and the process
revealed a great deal of horrors. You just need to open a random file to
find
them.
Jonas
