Paul Eggert <eggert@cs.ucla.edu> writes:

> Yes, that must be it. I installed the attached into gzip master on Savannah; 
> does it fix things for you?

That fixes the compilation of gzip.c, but of course causes a link
failure since it leaves two calls to function do_chown() that is no
longer defined.

The hack I used to build the Debian gzip 1.9-1 upload I did last night
is to conditionally add two bogus typedefs and elide the function
content if __MINGW32__ is defined.  So far, that seems to work ok.  My
patch is attached to this email.

It does feel like an "ugly" approach, but I just got confused trying to
unwind how the configure code which learns there are no *chown()
functions in the mingw environment didn't actually cause the right
things to happen in the build.  Since apparently I'm the first person to
stumble over this since you added do_chown shortly after the gzip 1.6
release, I doubt it's worth much more time from either of us to come up
with a "cleaner" patch...

Feel free to use some or all of my patch, but I am also happy to update
may packaging for Debian if you choose to put more time in this and
develop a better solution. 

Regards,

Bdale