Re: [PATCH] configure: Check bzip2 is available

[Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com>]

On 11/08/19 11:28, Philippe Mathieu-Daudé wrote:
> The bzip2 tool is not included in default installations.
> On freshly installed systems, ./configure succeeds but 'make'
> might fail later:
> 
>     BUNZIP2 pc-bios/edk2-i386-secure-code.fd.bz2
>   /bin/sh: bzip2: command not found
>   make: *** [Makefile:305: pc-bios/edk2-i386-secure-code.fd] Error 127
>   make: *** Deleting file 'pc-bios/edk2-i386-secure-code.fd'
>   make: *** Waiting for unfinished jobs....
> 
> Add a check in ./configure to warn the user if bzip2 is missing.

We've come full circle. Let me explain:

> 
> Fixes: 536d2173b2b

So this makes me kinda grumpy. If you look at the v3 posting of the patch that would later become commit 536d2173b2b:

  http://mid.mail-archive.com/20190321113408.19929-8-lersek@redhat.com

you see the following note in the changelog:

    - compress FD files with bzip2 rather than xz, so that decompression at
      "make install" time succeed on older build OSes too [Peter]

So I couldn't use xz because that was "too new" for some build OSes, but now we also can't take bzip2 for granted because that's "too old" for some other build OSes? This is ridiculous.

To be clear, my disagreement is only with the "Fixes" tag. For me, "Fixes" stands for something that, in retrospect, can be proven to have been a bug at the time the code was *originally* committed. But, at the time, taking "bzip2" for granted was *not* a bug. The conditions / circumstances have changed more recently, and the assumption about bzip2 has been invalidated *after* adding a dependency on bzip2.

Nonetheless, thank you for adapting the code to the potential absence of bzip2. Can you perhaps go in some details in the commit message, near "not included in default installations" and "freshly installed systems"? If we can, we should identify the exact distro release where this problem has been encountered (and I wouldn't mind a link to the BZ or ticket under which people agreed to remove bzip2 from the default package set).

Reviewed-by: Laszlo Ersek <lersek@redhat.com>

Thanks
Laszlo

> Reported-by: Thomas Huth <thuth@redhat.com>
> Signed-off-by: Philippe Mathieu-Daudé <philmd@redhat.com>
> ---
>  configure | 7 +++++++
>  1 file changed, 7 insertions(+)
> 
> diff --git a/configure b/configure
> index efe165edf9..9957e913e8 100755
> --- a/configure
> +++ b/configure
> @@ -1851,6 +1851,13 @@ python_version=$($python -c 'import sys; print("%d.%d.%d" % (sys.version_info[0]
>  # Suppress writing compiled files
>  python="$python -B"
>  
> +# Some firmware binaries are compressed with bzip2
> +if has bzip2; then
> +  :
> +else
> +  error_exit "bzip2 program not found. Please install it"
> +fi
> +
>  # Check that the C compiler works. Doing this here before testing
>  # the host CPU ensures that we had a valid CC to autodetect the
>  # $cpu var (and we should bail right here if that's not the case).
>