Re: WITHOUT_BZIP2?

"Enji Cooper (yaneurabeya)" <[email protected]> Fri, 3 Apr 2026 08:25:11 -0700
Newsgroups	gmane.os.freebsd.devel.hackers
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
> On Mar 29, 2026, at 9:34 AM, Dag-Erling Smørgrav <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> Daniel Engberg <[email protected]> writes:
>> Lexi Winter <[email protected]> writes:
>>> src.conf(5) documents the WITHOUT_BZIP2 knob.   however, unless i'm
>>> missing something, this knob doesn't actually do anything, i.e. it
>>> has no effect on the built system.
>>> 
>>> we could fix this in two ways:
>>> 
>>> - actually implement the option, to not build bzip2(1), libz2, etc.
>>> 
>>> - remove the option.
>>> 
>>> i am inclined towards the second option, since no one has complained
>>> about the option not working, and therefore almost certainly isn't
>>> using it.
>> Hi, Having pola in mind and the practical impact I think it's safe to
>> assume that you don't need to implement a functional variant if it is
>> broken, just remove it.  If libarchive (bsdtar) had native builtin
>> support perhaps it would be worth considering implement it and/or
>> removing the library itself (and move it to a package repo) but that
>> doesn't seem to be the case at least not as of writing.
> 
> Libarchive has had native support for bzip2 compression since at least
> 2012.  That, however, is only tangentially related to the BZIP2 option.
> 
> We have two build options related to bzip2:
> 
> 1) The BZIP2_SUPPORT option is supposed to enable / disable support for
>   the bzip2 algorithm / file format in various utilities such as tar,
>   zcat etc.  It currently only affects zcat (usr.bin/gzip).  It should,
>   but does not, also cover libarchive and its consumers, and control
>   whether libbz2 is built.
> 
> 2) The BZIP2 option is supposed to control whether bzip2, bunzip2, and
>   bzip2recover are built, but does not.
> 
> We should probably drop both options outright, since we've never
> provided corresponding options for gzip, xz / lzma, or zstd.

	If there was a way to build bootloaders without bzip2 support, that could save boot loader blocks for other things. That’s one case I can think of where it makes sense making the support work as desired.
Thanks!
-Enji
signature.asc (application/pgp-signature, 833 B)