Comment 1 for bug 2066270

Thanks for the notification, Nick.

lxml can probably live without HTTP support in libxml2, given that most HTTP access actually means HTTPS these days.

But the nice thing about direct gzip support is that there's neither Python object overhead for the compression/file access, nor a dependency on the Python GIL, nor the need to hold larger uncompressed output chunks in memory. I'd rather start talking to zlib directly than losing all that. However, linking against zlib means even more complication for the build process. The same applies to lzma. While both are part of the normal Python installation, linking against the (sometimes) Python shipped C libraries isn't easy or even possible, depending on the platform.

I'll add at least feature flags to the API so that users can detect if support is available.