removing older C libraries #96
Description
Some of the C libraries in here are potentially less necessary down the line as rust alternatives gain complete majority and stability.
Only two initial candidates for removal
curl
As far as I can there are very few uses of curl variants these days (it was more common pre-hyper dominance), but the curl crate still has plenty of downloads.
zlib
The flate2 crate can possibly replace zlib as it bundles miniz.c as the default implementation.
But, don't think it works with pq, and the openssl build probably also benefits from it (it might disable gzip support otherwise).
Status
2022: This is mostly a tracking issue for me. No immediate action is planned here this year. If you use these libraries and would like them to stay, or otherwise have input on this, please leave a comment.
EDIT: 2025. it's 3 years later, and these libraries are no more useful now. curl has been removed. zlib might be removed if stuff builds fine without it.
Activity
clux commentedon Feb 24, 2025
In the latest version curl has been removed. Combination of laziness + brokenness + not seeing it being very useful anymore. Think it's better to keep the image a little on the lighter side to cater to common use cases rather than the kitchen sink when the CI here is taking 1 hour for ARM. Plus, should make room for aws lc crypto #141
See #151 for details.
remove all remnants of commented out curl
[-]explore possibility of removing older C libraries[/-][+]removing older C libraries[/+]clux commentedon May 21, 2025
with
pqandopensslgone, it might be sensible to killzlibnow unless there's a need for it that I'm not fully imagining.guess i'd have to see how some tests play out with common crates. definitly keen on maintaining less C build scripts in general now. maybe it's worth to just wait for zlib-rs becoming stable via comments in #107. closing in favor of the zlib isuse.