[darcs-users] darcs patch: Make utf8-string mandatory. (and 1 more)

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On Tue, 28 Jul 2009, Trent W. Buck wrote:

> The patch is already in HEAD, at least.  As Joachim says on the Debian 
> list, if there's a legitimate bug in zlib 0.5.0 that Darcs should avoid, 
> it's better to break haskell-platform compatibility than allow 
> compilation with a buggy zlib.

Just to be clear, to avoid any slandering of zlib ;-)

zlib 0.5.0.0 is not buggy. Darcs was previously buggy in that it sometimes 
wrote out .gz files with bad checksums and then happily read them back in 
without checking, so the bug wasn't spotted for a long time, leaving a 
significant number of files in repos that had this corrupt checksum (but 
were otherwise fine). zlib perfectly legitimiately refused to read them 
in, making it unsuitable for use as the default zlib binding for darcs. 
zlib 0.5.2.0 adds an interface to allow clients to be informed of the 
broken checksums but still continue, which darcs makes use of to warn the 
user to run the new 'darcs gzcrcs' commadn to repair them.

Cheers,

Ganesh