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.
