zlib is designed to be a free, general-purpose, legally unencumbered -- that is, not covered by any patents -- lossless data-compression library for use on virtually any computer hardware and operating system. The zlib data format is itself portable across platforms. Unlike the LZW compression method used in Unix compress, the compression method currently used in zlib essentially never expands the data. (LZW can double or triple the file size in extreme cases.) zlib's memory footprint is also independent of the input data and can be reduced, if necessary, at some cost in compression.
libz-1.1.3: description + notes
zlib is thread safe. The data format used by the zlib library is described by RFCs (Request for Comments) 1950 to 1952 in the files ftp://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1950.txt (zlib format), rfc1951.txt (deflate format) and rfc1952.txt (gzip format). These documents are also available in other formats from ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/png/documents/zlib/zdoc-index.html
NOTE: Developers intending to use this distribution of libz for application development should be sure to read the information below. Users installing libz for the runtime environment only need not read any further.
Developers intending to use this library for development of other freeware packages or their own software applications will need to be familiar with a few peculiarities due to the way that this library is packaged and installed. The reasons for this installation strategy are described further in the fw_common product release notes.
The header files and libraries in this package are installed into /usr/freeware. This means that when building software using this distribution of libz you should be sure to do the following:
This flag will cause your compilations to correctly find the library's header files at compile time.
- Include the following flag on your compile lines:
- -I/usr/freeware/include
Include the following flag on your link lines:
-L/usr/freeware/lib (if using o32 ABI) -L/usr/freeware/lib32 (if using n32 ABI) -L/usr/freeware/lib64 (if using 64 ABI) This flag will cause the linker to correctly find the library's archive or shared object files at link time.
Additionally, include the following flag on your link lines:
-rpath /usr/freeware/lib (if using o32 ABI) -rpath /usr/freeware/lib32 (if using n32 ABI) -rpath /usr/freeware/lib64 (if using 64 ABI) This flag will allow the binary to locate the shared object library files when the application is run. This is required since the shared objects are stored in these /usr/freeware subdirectories which are not searched by the run-time linker by default.
Finally, if you are building an installable package for inst (contributing to freeware, for example) be sure to make your package depend upon this package. Add the following line to your spec file: prereq ( fw_libz.sw.lib 1230000000 1239999900 ) Following these guidelines will allow your application to safely and easily use the software in this package.
To auto-install this package, go back and click on the respective install icon.