Hi RagulR! I'm trying to investigate this and I can't figure out whether mysql_config was wrong to suggest you `-lzlib` and it should've instead suggested `-lz`, or it shouldn't suggest `-lzlib` at all. Is it possible to remove the `-lzlib` flag by hand in whatever you are compiling and see if the error goes away?

Thanks for the investigation, Robert.
Yes, I currently overriding the flag '-lzlib' as '-lz' to unblock my installation.

But I could see the zlib need to be accessed as -lz instead of '-lzlib'

[root@~]# pkg-config zlib --libs

-lz

Good that you unblocked your installation! So ideally mysql_config/mariadb_config should output `-lzlib` only when running the script from within a build-from-sources mariadb server (and that server is built with -DWITH_ZLIB=bundled) and in that case it is correct, because the bundled version of zlib results in a static library called 'libzlib.a'.
But for binary tarballs it should never happen, mysql_config should call mariadb_config behind the scenes and that should only return '-lmariadb' (in theory) as linking flag starting with 10.2 (for sure it should never return '-lzlib' because we don't even ship any libzlib.a in our tarballs).

I would appreciate a lot if you could help me understand why mysql_config behaves that way for you.
I need to know some internal values from within the script, you can obtain them by going into the script and add something like this before the script exits:
> echo "########"
> echo $basedir
> ls -l $basedir/bin/
> echo $me

Let me know if you need help with that.

Also RagulR, I would appreciate a lot if you could try your installation without any '-lz' or '-lzlib' at all.

Fixed with b082716892071fdc3c961e9afaa011e0f6beb102