Re: [lmi] Do we have zlib already?

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Thu, 9 Jun 2016 22:37:18 +0000 Greg Chicares <address@hidden> wrote:

GC> On 2016-06-09 22:05, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
...
GC> >  If so, I can already confirm that compressing these files with gzip (and
GC> > renaming them to not have the .gz suffix) works, i.e. I can still
GC> > create a new illustration using the sample product. So far I've
GC> > tested it only with my MSVC build of lmi which uses a default build
GC> > of libxml2 which does include zlib support, but I'll retest it with
GC> > the official build later.

 Hello again,

 I have, of course, completely forgotten about the conflict between the old
version of libxml2 and newer (but basically all of them by now, as "newer"
means "less than 11 years old") version of zlib included in MinGW 4.9.1
that already gave me some grief before, see

        https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lmi/2016-01/msg00026.html

The solution chosen back then was to disable zlib support and was done in
91a19b246d553712e7f92606a88fb6487dd15621, but re-enabling it makes the
problem appear again, of course, so now we need some other solution.

 I still think that updating libxml2 to a modern version would be the best
thing to do, but the minimal solution sufficient to avoid the crash is to
apply just the change from

https://github.com/GNOME/libxml2/commit/a7e79f28689c574e0bbef17f4cb3da00249181ff

Please let me know what would you prefer and I'll make the appropriate
changes in install_libxml2_libxslt.make.


GC> >  I'd just like to know if compressing the files above and checking if an
GC> > illustration can be created is a sufficient test or whether I should try 
to
GC> > compress/check something more/else?
GC> 
GC> I believe that's not merely sufficient, but plenary and conclusive.

 FWIW I can confirm that after

1. Applying the libxml2 patch above
2. Removing --without-zlib
3. Compressing all XML files

        % for f in 
/opt/lmi/data/sample.{database,funds,policy,rounding,strata}; do
                gzip -c $f > $f.tmp && mv $f.tmp $f
        done

lmi still seems to work correctly and, notably, illustration creation
works.

 But, again, to make this work out of the box, we need to do something
about our ancient libxml2: either patch or upgrade it.

 Regards,
VZ