Re: Why did devel/bison grow a dependency on xz?

[David Brownlee <abs%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On 8 October 2012 02:35, Eric Schnoebelen <eric%cirr.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> I'm curious why devel/bison grew a dependency on archivers/xz?
>
> The dependency is an implicit one, based on setting EXTRACT_SUFX
> to .tar.xz.
>
> I guess the question is, why was it essential to create the
> dependency when bison is still also being made available as a
> "traditional" .tar.gz?
>
> I encountered this while trying to bring a(n admittedly antique)
> SS20 running NetBSD 2.1 up to date using pkgsrc-2012Q3.  The
> poor little beast spent a couple of days trying to build
> gcc-3.4, so it could build xz, which then failed to build. And
> building xz was effectively pointless, as the bison sources were
> available as .tar.gz.
>
> Objections to reverting devel/bison to using the more
> "traditional" .tar.gz tarball?

NetBSD-6 ships with xz, which makes it a much cheaper option for
anyone on the latest NetBSD version (that doesn't necessarily mean
ignoring older versions and other OSs is OK, but it is a datapoint).

I count 95 packages which set EXTRACT_SUFX=.tar.xz, including bison,
automake, gtk2. It you don't hit it on bison I suspect you'd hit it on
another package later, and the chances of that are going to go up over
time as the number of tar.xz packages increase.

The GCC_REQD=3.4 does make it much more expensive on older NetBSD
versions - out of curiosity does it fail to build or at runtime if you
try to build it with the builtin compiler?