BZip2 sources and GnuPG tarball

David Shaw dshaw at jabberwocky.com
Tue Jun 21 03:58:58 CEST 2005


On Tue, Jun 21, 2005 at 01:22:02AM +0200, Carlo Luciano Bianco wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I was just wondering why BZip2 sources are not (yet?) inserted into the
> GnuPG tarball like zlib, gettext, regexp, etc. 
> 
> Is such inclusion planned, or are there some technical (or maybe legal)
> reasons preventing to do so? 

It is not planned.  GnuPG can make use of many libraries, such as
libcurl, libusb, libreadline, and yes, libbz2.  It is just not
possible for GnuPG to include all of them - it defeats the point of
libraries.  The included copies would inevitably fall out of date,
they would have to be actively watched for new versions of security
updates, and so on.

GnuPG does include the zip library, since it is nearly impossible to
interoperate between PGP and GnuPG without it, but that's a special
case.  Best to keep such special cases to a minimum.

David



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