"gzip: /usr/bin/gzip: unknown suffix -- ignored" error during MacPorts 2.3.4 build

[thecloud@…]

Steps to reproduce:

$ export GZIP="-9"
$ tar xvzf MacPorts-2.3.4.tar.gz -C /tmp/
$ cd /tmp/MacPorts-2.3.4/
$ ./configure && make

If the GZIP environment variable is set to a whitespace-separated list of options (as is documented on the man page for gzip), the configure script for MacPorts fails with this error:

configure: === extracting vendor/tcl8.5.15-src.tar.gz
gzip: /usr/bin/gzip: unknown suffix -- ignored
configure: error: tarball vendor/tcl8.5.15-src.tar.gz did not extract to vendor/tcl8.5.15/unix

Workaround:

$ unset GZIP

Diagnosis: The configure script (incorrectly) expects that if the GZIP environment variable is set, it contains a path to the gzip binary. This directly conflicts with the documented contents of the GZIP variable, as understood by /usr/bin/gzip. Unsetting GZIP shouldn't be necessary to build MacPorts successfully, since it shouldn't overload the contents of an existing variable.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Duplicate of #43245 I think. This should have been fixed in r125362. You can check whether MacPorts trunk (version 2.3.99, which will one day become 2.4) fixes it; it should.

[ryandesign (Ryan Carsten Schmidt)]

Cc Me!

[thecloud@…]

Yes, this looks like the same issue as #43245.