Re: Autoconf distributions and xz dependency

[Jim Meyering]

Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Mar 2012, Jim Meyering wrote:
>>
>> If you can demonstrate a portability problem, please provide details.
>>> From what I've heard (distributing xz-only compressed tarballs of
>> coreutils, grep, diffutils, parted, etc.) there have been no
>> problems building xz from source on the few systems for which it is not
>> yet available pre-packaged.
>
> It does not successfully build using GCC on my Solaris 10 system, and
> not even with the workaround described in the INSTALL file.

Did you report it?
I've been building xz on sparc Solaris 10 with gcc since
back when the program was called lzma.

> Regardless, building xz has certain documented requirements of its
> build environment (e.g. C'99 compiler and system headers) which can
> not be satisfied by all systems.

Since gcc works just about anywhere, that's usually enough
for anyone porting to the um... mature system vendors.

>> I've heard that an embedded system user had trouble using xz
>> to decompress because their system had only 32MB of RAM and no swap.
>> However, even in that extreme case I think they found a work-around.
>
>> From what I have heard, even hundreds of MB of RAM may not be
> sufficient.

There are options to tune how much memory xz uses.
Perhaps the people you heard from didn't know about those.
xz has evolved in the last couple of years, so even if your
anecdote represented a bug, it may well be fixed by now.