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 _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - [email protected] http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
