Re: Remove dependency on gunzip

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Antonio,

Thanks for the bug report and patch.

* Antonio Diaz Diaz wrote on Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 05:42:29PM CEST:
> I recently received a error message from GNU info on a computer
> without the gunzip binary installed. While fixing this error, I
> noticed automake introduces in every package using automake the same
> dependency that provoked the error in GNU info.

Yes.  Same with uncompress, bunzip2, unzip, and others.

> 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?

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.  gunzip is BTW listed in the GNU Coding Standards as tool that
can be expected to be present on a system, just like gzip, so I guess
it would be reasonable to adjust this too if there is a real problem
on some systems.  Which system was this, and does it happen on others,
too?

You can work around this with a hard- or a symlink from gzip to gunzip.

OTOH, wasn't it likely for some of the compressions that only the
decompressor is installed, due to them being separate packages with
separate licenses or so?

Cheers,
Ralf