Problems Compiling CFEngine With Static Libraries

Here's a little weekend trick for you :)

I ran into this while compiling the latest version of cfengine. If you've ever built it, you know that two of its prerequisites are having access to includes and library files from openssl and Berkely db during configure and compile time. We visited the one program with a heavy take on building the db package in a previous post.

So, with the assumption that you've already installed Berkeley db and openssl and are now ready to configure cfengine, the first hurdle is easy enough to get around. If your libraries and includes are in standard places (like /usr/lib and /usr/include) it isn't even a hurdle at all. However, if you've built your Berkeley db and openssl software into special directories, you'll need to pass at least one of these two options to configure:

host # ./configure --with-berkeleydb=/some/dir/db --with-openssl=/some/dir/openssl

That part's simple to figure out, because

host # ./configure --help

will tell you what flags you need to pass after you get the error during configuration. Of course, reading the INSTALL and/or README file first would help with that, too ;)

The second hurdle is a little less obvious, and may not happen to everyone. It has to do with how you compiled your Berkeley db and openssl source. If you compiled them to have shared libraries, you won't run into this issue. However, if you compiled them with static libraries, the cfengine "make" process will balk when it gets to the point that it call those libraries. You would see an error similar to:

Undefined error dlopen -- undefined symbol...blah, blah, blah

This is because it won't, or can't, deal with the static libraries you've compiled for db and openssl.

The good news is that you can get around this fairly easily by setting the following two variables in your shell and just restarting the "make."

host # BERKELEY_DB_LIB="/some/dir/db/lib/libdb-4.5.a -lrt"
host # OPENSSL_LIB_LIB="/some/dir/openssl/lib/libcrypto.a -ldl"

and then running make with the -e flag, which will give your environment variables (set above) precedence over variables set in the Makefile.

It's important to note that some systems (generally older ones, like Solaris 2.6) don't have the -lrt (librt) library. In these cases, just use -ldl for both the db and openssl evironment variables.

After that, it's all icing :)

Cheers,

, Mike

linux unix internet technology

CC FLAG UPDATE - Building Solaris Packages Quickly - An Old Post Revisited

Hey There,

Updated Some More - Thank you for your emails :) I've updated this once more to hard-code the CC=gcc flag on the configure line. This db package's configure script appears not to pickup gcc more often than it does, so, unless you're using cc, it's best just to force gcc.

Now that we've just gotten through a marathon "how to" on creating Linux RPMS, I'd thought I'd look back at the old post I referenced at the beginning of the week regarding making your own Solaris packages.

That post was, and still is, theoretically sound. Although, looking back at it, I feel that it really lacked the kind of example work-up that would have made the instructions come back and hit home. So with reference to my original (admittedly dry) instruction on how to make your own Solaris pkg files, here's a quick example of the actual process of creating a package from compiling your software to the finished product. Hopefully this will not only flesh-out the original post, but also show how much simpler this is to do in reality than it is in theory :)

And, in an effort to make up for lost time and dispel any possibility of confusion, we're going to use a real freely-available source gzip that anyone can grab for free and walk through this on their own Solaris machine step-by-step, cut-and-paste. Here are the basic requirements in order to reproduce this on your own without having to do any extra work outside of the instructions posted:

1. Have gcc and make installed on your Solaris System.
2. Run Solaris on Sparc (not x_86 or Intel - although this should still work).
3. If possible, use the 64 bit version (As long as the "isainfo" or "isalist" commands return "sparcv9" somewhere in their output, you should be in the same boat I am as I do this compile and package creation. Again, this probably won't be an issue if you use 32 bit.

And that should be it. Now we just need to download the Berkeley DB 4.6.21 source gzipped tarball (available by clicking the name of the product on this line or here ;)

And off we go! I'm going to basically walk through this by example (what I'll actually type during the process) and leave out the tons of output from "configure" and "make," etc, so this doesn't get too hard to read. Hopefully, it will be painfully easy to understand :)

Step 1. Unpack and build your software (grab your Berkeley DB source now if you haven't already!

SPECIAL NOTE: This post has been updated to reflect the need to run configure from the build_unix subdirectory under the db-4.6.21 directory. You may also need to set CC=gcc as an option on your configure command line, but db should pick it up as long as it comes first in your PATH. Apologies for the typo.

host # mkdir /tmp/build
host # cp db-4.6.21.tar.gz /tmp/build/.
host # cd /tmp/build
host # gzip -d -c db-4.6.21.tar.gz|tar xvpf -
... <--- This will be shorthand for obligatory command output that doesn't make a difference to us here.
host # cd db-4.6.21
host # cd build_unix
host # ../dist/configure CC=gcc --prefix=/usr/local/db-4.6.21
...
host # make
...
host # make docdir=/usr/local/db-4.6.21/doc/4.6.21 install
...
host # cd /tmp/build
host # rm -r db-4.6.21

And we're done with the compile :)

Step 2. Create the Solaris pkg file from our installation!

host # cd /usr/local/db-4.6.21
host # find . -print|pkgproto >prototype
host # echo "i pkginfo" >>TEMPFILE
host # echo "i checkinstall" >>TEMPFILE
host # cat prototype >>TEMPFILE
host # mv TEMPFILE prototype
host # vi checkinstall <--- For the two files we need to edit, I'll just indent and put the contents of each below the lines where I use "vi" (my favorite editor). You can edit the file with any editor you want :)

#!/bin/sh

 platform_should_be="sparc"
 platform=`uname -p`
 if [ ${platform} != ${platform_should_be} ]
 then
  echo "PROGRAM can only be installed on ${platform_should_be}"
  exit 1
 fi
 exit

host # vi pkginfo

SUNW_PRODNAME="SunOS"
 SUNW_PRODVERS="5.9"
 SUNW_PKGTYPE="usr"
 PKG="MTdb"
 NAME="Berkely DB-4.6.21"
 VERSION="4.6.21"
 VENDOR="Open Source"
 ARCH="sparc"
 EMAIL="eggi@comcast.net"
 CATEGORY="application"
 BASEDIR=/usr/local/db-4.6.21
 DESC="http://linuxshellaccount.blogspot.com DB-4.6.21"
 PSTAMP="The Linux And Unix Menagerie"
 CLASSES="none"

host # pkgmk -b `pwd` -d /tmp
...
host # pkgtrans -s /tmp /tmp/build/MTdb.pkg MTdb
...
host # rm -r /tmp/MTdb

And now you can move the /tmp/build/MTdb.pkg file anywhere on the file system you want. You should be able to utilize all the applicable "pkginfo" command options against it and it should install as easily (assuming you left it in /tmp/build) as this (of course, it won't be any harder if you install it from anywhere else ;)

host # pkgadd -d /tmp/build/MTdb.pkg

also

host # pkgrm MTdb <--- If you ever want to delete it from the package repository

Hope you enjoyed that whirlwind tour of a Solaris package (pkg) build in almost-real-time. Hopefully, also, it helps complement our previous post on creating Solaris packages by giving you a solid working example to compare against the theory!

Cheers,


, Mike

linux unix internet technology