According to me update logs, somewhere between zlib versions 1.2.3.4 and
1.2.6, the definition of the gzFile type was changed from void * to
struct gzFile_s *, an opaque struct. Note that gzFile is already the
pointer in either case. Our code has assumed, however, that you use
gzFile like FILE, namely that the APIs take a pointer to the type, but
that is not the case. So code like
gzFile *handle = gzopen(...)
is wrong.
This used to pass silently because you can assign a void* to a void**,
but with the newer definition you get a bunch of warnings like
pg_backup_files.c: In function ‘_StartData’:
pg_backup_files.c:256:11: warning: assignment from incompatible pointer type [enabled by default]
pg_backup_files.c: In function ‘_WriteData’:
pg_backup_files.c:271:2: warning: passing argument 1 of ‘gzwrite’ from incompatible pointer type [enabled by default]
/usr/include/zlib.h:1318:12: note: expected ‘gzFile’ but argument is of type ‘struct gzFile_s **’
Affected are pg_dump and pg_basebackup.
Fixing most of this is not difficult, see attached patch. The only
ugliness is in pg_backup_archiver.h
FILE *FH; /* General purpose file handle */
which is used throughout pg_dump as sometimes a real FILE* and sometimes
a gzFile handle. There are also some fileno() calls on this, so just
replacing this with an #ifdef isn't going to work. This might need some
more restructuring to make the code truly type-safe. My quick patch
replaces the type with void*, thus sort of restoring the original
situation that allowed this to work.
Note that these are only warnings, so we probably don't need to worry
about backpatching this in a hurry.