Today I had a very pleasant conversation with Julian Seward, of bzip2 and Valgrind fame. Julian has kindly agreed to cede the maintainership of bzip2 to me.

Bzip2 has not had a release since 2010. In the meantime, Linux distros have accumulated a number of bug/security fixes for it. Seemingly every distributor of bzip2 patches its build system. The documentation generation step is a bit creaky. There is no source control repository, nor bug tracker. I hope to fix these things gradually.

This is the new repository for bzip2.

Ways in which you can immediately help by submitting merge requests:

Look at the issues; currently they are around auto-generating the version number.

Create a basic continuous integration pipeline that at least builds the code and runs the tests.

Test the autotools setup, courtesy of Stanislav Brabec, and improve it as you see fit.

The rustification will happen in a separate branch for now, at least until the Autotools setup settles down.

I hope to have a 1.0.7 release soon, but this really needs your help. Let's revive this awesome little project.