Shared library conflicts

[Thomas Hallgren <thomas(at)tada(dot)se>]

There was a discussion some time back concerning the linking of the 
postgres backend. Some libraries where linked although they where not 
needed, mainly because it was convenient. I had a problem with PL/Java 
since a Sun JVM ships with their own version of libz.so (they call it 
libzip.so). Sun fixed the problem, simply by adding a namespace to all 
functions in their own library so I didn't stress the issue any further. 
Now this bites me again. Sun forgot to remove the old functions in their 
libzip.so on the amd64 platform.

I have of course reported this to Sun and I expect it to be fixed in 
future releases of Java but shouldn't this be fixed for PostgreSQL too? 
Perhaps we should consider this a more generic problem. The more 
libraries that are linked with the backend, the greater the risk that 
add-on modules will run into conflicts. What effort would be involved to 
fix this once and for all?

Another related question. What happens when I use --without-zlib? Does 
it have any effect on besides disabling compression for the dump/restore 
utilities? Is there anyway to make it affect the backend only?

Kind Regards,
Thomas Hallgren