Bzip2 – Visual Studio libbz2.dll Build

Patches and a PowerShell script to build bzip2 with Visual Studio using a dynamic library (libbz2.dll).

Patches

Patches are included in this repository that modify the makefile.msc file in the bzip2 distribution to:

• Build cleanly with Visual Studio 2013 and later (replacing deprecated command line options).
• Build libbz2 as a DLL (libbz2.dll).
• Dynamically link the executable outputs with libbz2.dll (by default the executables are statically linked).
• Add a version resource to the executables and DLL.
• Fix a 'not a normal file' error when using bzip2.exe to compress large files.

PowerShell Script

The PowerShell script, Build-Bzip2.ps1, performs the following actions:

1. Downloads the bzip2 source from https://www.sourceware.org/bzip2/.
2. Extracts and verifies the source.
3. Applies the patches (see above).
4. For the x86 and x64 architectures:
   1. Executes nmake to build bzip2.
   2. Copies build outputs to a directory named outputs.
   3. Creates zipped packages containing build outputs in a directory named packages.

Build-Bzip2.ps1 requires:

• 64-bit Windows.
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 or later (set $VisualStudioDir accordingly).
• PowerShell Community Extensions.
• Git (used to apply patches).

Binaries

32-bit and 64-bit Windows binaries can be downloaded from the releases page.

The binary releases depend on the Visual Studio C Runtime Library (please refer to the release notes for details).