On Wed, 6 Feb 2013, Aleksandar Lazic wrote:

> today I have build curl 7.29.0 without zlib.
>
> When I call 'curl -h' I get the option '--compressed' shown, but
> curl/libcurl was build without zlib.

Correct. The -h / --help output is the same no matter the capabilities of the
underlying libraries.

The reasons for this are primarily:

1 - because it can be really hard to pre-determine exactly what features that
     can be used or not and in particular because the current code has no logic
     in place that can filter the -h list depending on underlying capabilities

2 - you can argue that -h outputs all the available options for the curl tool
     provided that the library is supported. I'm not convinced that we should
     stop advertising options just because libcurl right then doesn't support
     the option but rather show them so that you'll get a consistent list that
     is stable and you can also learn about options you may want to use once
     you get a more complete libcurl to use...

You'll see that if you try to actually use the option it will fail with an
error message.

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se
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