[fpc-devel] Please include gmp.dll in Win32 distribution of FPC 2.6.2 and later

[Craig Peterson]

On 12/2/2012 4:31 PM, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> I'm not really happy with ports of sophisticated C libraries. When
> working on the Abbrevia sourcecode I came across a problem in one of the
> decompression modules. 

Abbrevia's DEFLATE engine isn't a port of zlib, it's an implementation
of RFC 1951.  It may have had a similar bug, but it was not a
C-to-Pascal rewrite.  Any similarities would have been due to following
the algorithm laid out in the RFC.

Among other things, Abbrevia's implementation supports the Deflate64
variant, which Zlib does not.

> after the module had been in use for more than ten years! 

Zlib's most recent release (1.2.7) is dated May 2012 and fixes bugs of
its own.  Since they are *different* implementations, it's equally
likely that Abbrevia's version would have avoided bugs that the C
version had.

> That's why I think that such libraries should be maintained by their
> own developers, so that all bug fixes and improvements become
> available immediately to the FPC users.

Zlib is stable, not because it's maintained by "their own developers",
but because the community contributes fixes and bug reports.  Likewise,
Abbrevia is much better now than a few years ago because I started
maintaining and fixing it.  If you'd done that rather than badmouthing
it and trying to reimplement it from scratch it would be even further
along than it is.

-- 
Craig Peterson
Scooter Software
Abbrevia Project Admin