Building using zlib on Windows

Danger Will Robinson - this is confusing and I'm not sure which procedure is right!

Using Gnuwin32's Binary

You can get the zipped files (binary and developer, -bin and -lib) from http://gnuwin32.sourceforge.net/packages/zlib.htm and use them just like all the other dependency packages ("extract here" and copy)

However, this doesn't give you a libzdll.a - I have yet to see if this works for building Abi. (It's needed for building libxml2 if you are building with zlib support)

Using Zlib.Net's Binary

This is what I've used for building Abi and plugins until now (22 dec 2007)

The procedure for installing zlib is a little bit more complicated than most, mainly because the Windows binary is intended for use in varied situations.

Get it first from www.zlib.net

Unzip it

Copy the include directory to c:/mingw/ (overwriting/adding to the existing one)

Copy zlib1.dll to c:/mingw/bin/

Rename zdll.lib to libzdll.a and put it in c:/mingw/lib/

Ta-da!

(If you are really adventurous, you can make a dependency package like for the others, with a bin/ directory containing zlib1.dll, the include/ directory it comes with, and a lib/ directory containing the renamed libzdll.a, for ease of re-installing your environment)