On Oct 1, 2010, at 8:50 AM, Dennis Peterson wrote:
> The bzip2 source is a mess that requires much customization to build as the 
> author hasn't the resources to put it together right.

The build infrastructure for bzip uses a plain-jane Makefile with defaults 
oriented towards ELF/Linux.  With mild effort, they can be adjusted for 
FreeBSD, MacOS X, Solaris, and so forth.

> It builds fine in Solaris, not so fine on the Mac, for example. I imagine 
> there are problems with BSD, too, and BSD is the basis of OS X. Many of us 
> don't have the time to spend dinking with the code to get what may or may not 
> be a reliable build.

Well, it does come with self-test mechanism, but you're welcome to submit more 
thorough regression tests to the author.

> The folks at MacPorts and elsewhere have it sorted out, but since it is an OS 
> X intrinsic, Apple needs to step up and provide the fix.

Agreed.  You're welcome to submit a bug report to Apple, although I suspect 
that it's already being worked on.

> It makes the CIO happy to not have unsupported versions installed, too.  I 
> think it was probably a bad idea for Apple to make bzip2 a big part of OS X 
> given the scale of the resource.

Supporting popular compression mechanism seems to be a reasonable thing to do.  
I'd imagine that xz will make it's way into the OS for similar reasons as that 
becomes used more widely.

> A person might infer I don't like bzip2 (the product) and they'd be right.


Most people have opinions.  What they do with them matters more....

Regards,
-- 
-Chuck

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