Re: .tar.xz only policy

[Jim Meyering]

Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> NEWS for GNU grep 2.10 says:
>
> | xz is portable enough and in wide-enough use that distributing
> | only .tar.xz files is enough.
>
> FWIW, xz cannot be built with GCC 2.95 (or older), making it
> unavailable on some platforms such as OpenBSD/vax.

Thanks for the report.
This is the first I've heard about anyone being unable to build xz.
However, I have to admit that whether OpenBSD/vax is a reasonable
portability target seems debatable.

One might ask why OpenBSD/vax is content with the decade-old gcc-2.95,
yet still wants to use the very latest grep ;-)

Seriously though, I asked Lasse Collin (xz author) about this issue
and he said he thought there was an OpenBSD patch to make xz build
even when you're stuck with gcc-2.95.  If you find it, please post
it to the xz-utils mailing list: tukaani.org/xz/lists.html

For now, I suggest you download the tarball to some other system
and uncompress it before copying it to your ancient vax.