There have been many reports of bugs in the assembler codes
intended to speed up deflate and inflate. They are third-party
contributions in contrib, and so are not supported by the zlib
maintainers.
An old inffast.c optimization turns out to not be optimal anymore
with modern compilers, and furthermore was not compliant with the
C standard, for which decrementing a pointer before its allocated
memory is undefined. Per the recommendation of a security audit of
the zlib code by Trail of Bits and TrustInSoft, in support of the
Mozilla Foundation, this "optimization" was removed, in order to
avoid the possibility of undefined behavior.
This patch allows zlib to compile cleanly with the -Wcast-qual gcc
warning enabled, but only if ZLIB_CONST is defined, which adds
const to next_in and msg in z_stream and in the in_func prototype.
A --const option is added to ./configure which adds -DZLIB_CONST
to the compile flags, and adds -Wcast-qual to the compile flags
when ZLIBGCCWARN is set in the environment.
