Re: Remove dependency on gunzip

[Antonio Diaz Diaz]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > As gunzip is a link to gzip, the only difference between using
> > "gunzip" and "gzip -d" is that the former adds a gratuitous
> > dependency on the gunzip name.
>
> Well, from the user's perspective, who never needs 'make dist', your
> patch adds a gratuitous dependency on the gzip name, no?

distcheck depends on dist, so no, my patch does not add any dependency 
for anybody. Using the same name (gzip) for compressing and 
decompressing the tarball only reduces the total number of dependencies.

Moreover, given that gunzip was a symlink to gzip and more recently a 
small script executing "gzip -d", I don't see how one can have a working 
gunzip installed without a working gzip.


> Don't get me wrong.  If there is a distinct advantage to doing this
> move, then we should probably do it, but it's a NEWS-worthy change, and
> it should be done for all compressors for which the same reasoning
> holds.

I agree it should be done for all the gzip-like compressors. In fact it 
is already done for xz:

distcheck: dist
        case '$(DIST_ARCHIVES)' in \
        *.tar.gz*) \
          GZIP=$(GZIP_ENV) gunzip -c $(distdir).tar.gz | $(am__untar) ;;\
        *.tar.bz2*) \
          bunzip2 -c $(distdir).tar.bz2 | $(am__untar) ;;\
        *.tar.lzma*) \
          unlzma -c $(distdir).tar.lzma | $(am__untar) ;;\
        *.tar.xz*) \
          xz -dc $(distdir).tar.xz | $(am__untar) ;;\
        *.tar.Z*) \
          uncompress -c $(distdir).tar.Z | $(am__untar) ;;\
        *.shar.gz*) \
          GZIP=$(GZIP_ENV) gunzip -c $(distdir).shar.gz | unshar ;;\
        *.zip*) \
          unzip $(distdir).zip ;;\
        esac


Regards,
Antonio.