Re: Future autoconf package compression

[Jim Meyering]

Marko Lindqvist wrote:
> On 2 March 2012 06:45, Eric Blake <address@hidden> wrote:
>>
>> The Autoconf team is considering releasing only .xz files for 2.69; if
>> this would be a hardship for you, and you need the .gz or .bz2 release,
>> please speak up now.
>
>  I just encountered new argument for providing .gz of autoconf also in
> the future.
>
>  I were updating automake version used in OpenEmbedded, and though to
> switch from tar.gz to tar.xz package while at it. That failed because
> of circular dependency. In short: building xz decompressor requires
> automake.

Hi Marko,

I have simulated building xz with a broken version of automake:
(similar to when automake is not installed)

    wget http://www.tukaani.org/xz/xz-5.0.4.tar.xz
    tar xf xz-5.0.4.tar.xz
    cd xz-5.0.4
    mkdir x; printf '#!/bin/sh\nexit 1\n' > x/automake; chmod a+x x/automake
    PATH=x:$PATH ./configure && make && make check

All of those commands succeeded, so it is clear to me that building
xz that way does not depend on automake.

Jim