Add a check in ./configure to warn the user if bzip2 is missing.
We've come full circle. Let me explain:
Fixes: 536d2173b2b
So this makes me kinda grumpy. If you look at the v3 posting of the
patch that would later become commit 536d2173b2b:
http://mid.mail-archive.com/address@hidden
you see the following note in the changelog:
- compress FD files with bzip2 rather than xz, so that
decompression at
"make install" time succeed on older build OSes too [Peter]
So I couldn't use xz because that was "too new" for some build OSes,
but now we also can't take bzip2 for granted because that's "too old"
for some other build OSes? This is ridiculous.
To be clear, my disagreement is only with the "Fixes" tag. For me,
"Fixes" stands for something that, in retrospect, can be proven to
have been a bug at the time the code was *originally* committed. But,
at the time, taking "bzip2" for granted was *not* a bug. The
conditions / circumstances have changed more recently, and the
assumption about bzip2 has been invalidated *after* adding a
dependency on bzip2.
Nonetheless, thank you for adapting the code to the potential absence
of bzip2. Can you perhaps go in some details in the commit message,
near "not included in default installations" and "freshly installed
systems"? If we can, we should identify the exact distro release where
this problem has been encountered (and I wouldn't mind a link to the
BZ or ticket under which people agreed to remove bzip2 from the
default package set).