Jani Nikula <jani@nikula.org> writes:

> Is it reasonable to require zlib? It's possible to have conditional
> build for this, but it will be laborous to do it cleanly. I could be
> persuaded either way, perhaps more easily to just requiring it.

If I recall correctly, xapian needs zlib.  At least on Debian this is a
hard dependency. What is needed additionally is the zlib headers.

> If you do require zlib, the missing dependencies error message from
> configure should include a check for have_zlib and a note about it
> similar to other required dependencies.

good point.

> Also, it would seem natural to support gzipped input in restore as
> well... do you think it would be silly to support gzipped output only
> internally until we've added gzipped input too? This could be in a later
> release in the future.

I couldn't decide which was sillier: to have have gzipped output but not
input, or to leave off the command line argument (it's something like 3
lines of diff). I lean to making it accessible from the CLI to better
support testing.

d