[svn.haxx.se] · SVN Dev · SVN Users · SVN Org · TSVN Dev · TSVN Users · Subclipse Dev · Subclipse Users · this month's index

Re: OT: useless rant, Was: Building Subversion 1.2 on OS X 10.4 fails

From: John Szakmeister <john_at_szakmeister.net>
Date: 2005-05-22 14:57:15 CEST

On Saturday 21 May 2005 17:39, Scott Palmer wrote:
> On May 21, 2005, at 2:44 PM, Kyle Kline wrote:
> >> in other words, something wrong with the package dependencies on
> >> your system, not with subversion's ./configure
> >
> > Very true - SuSE 9.1 out of the box does NOT include many of the
> > common GNU developer tools, and some of the ones it does include (or
> > you can download using YaST) are outdated. More the fault of the
> > distro not being geared toward developers.

I've never found this to be the case... I've been using SuSE's
distributions for years now, and find them to not only be pretty
reliable, but easy to install, and up-to-date (at least if you buy when
it first comes out). I think the biggest problem (and most distributions
suffer from this), is having to know to install the '-dev' packages so
that you can correctly compile programs.

> On May 21, 2005, at 2:40 PM, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote:
> > On May 20, 2005, at 9:33 PM, Scott Palmer wrote:
> >> So autoconf fails again. I can't say that I'm surprised.
> >
> > What does this have to do with autoconf?
> >
> > As far as I can tell, it's a weirdness with library dependencies.
>
> Isn't that one of the things that autoconf is supposed to figure
> out? Shouldn't it tell me that I don't have some needed module?
> Isn't that one of it's main reasons for being? If SuSE 9.1 was
> suitable for compiling subversion isn't that exactly what autoconf
> was going to detect with the zillions of queries of every
> developement related property of my system that there could possibly
> be?
>
> I guess the issue is that it doesn't realize in this case that there
> are additional dependancies that apr-utils had? And apparently those
> dependencies should have been resolved by the SuSE installation? I
> just figured that if it was going to scan my system so completely
> that it should have known that the build was going to fail.

If you look, I'll bet that you find that the gdbm share library is on your
system. For apr-utils to run with an application, everything necessary
is there. However, if you want to *link* to apr-utils, you need the
gdbm-devel package (which brings in the extra information so that you can
link to the shared library).

> > The apr-util library links to many other sub-libraries; it has a
> > generic DBM interface, so it usually links to dbm, gdbm, or
> > whatever dbm library it can find. It also as an XML interface, so
> > it links to expat, libxml, or whatever it can find.
> >
> > It looks like whatever apr-util subversion was linking to, expected
> > to be already linked to gdbm, and your system didn't have gdbm.
> > This indicates to be something bogus with your pre-installed apr-
> > util... in other words, something wrong with the package
> > dependencies on your system, not with subversion's ./configure.
> > Subversion picked up an installed apr-util, but the apr-util itself
> > was already broken.
>
> So apr-util is sitting on my system in a useless state? This is a
> problem with SuSE 9.1 pretending to have apr-util installed but
> actually it is missing big chunks that are required for apr-util to
> actually be usable?

It's useable... just not able to be linked to. Fire up Apache, and you'll
see that it can run just fine.

> I could go into another rant about why Linux will probably still take
> another 20 years to become usable for the mainstream.. but I'll
> resist the urge this time... ;-)
>
> All I can say is that building stuff shouldn't be this difficult, not
> that it is a fault with subversion code in this case. It appears that
> building anything on Linux is a roll of the dice. It's unfortunate
> to say the least.

I can definitely sympathize. I'm by no means a Linux guru, and it took me
a while to get spun up and figure out the distributions break up their
packages. The good news is that everything you need is there in SuSE
9.1. If you still have trouble building, I can probably give you some
more insight into that (I was using 9.1 for quite a while and more
recently upgraded to 9.2... compiling is the same for both of them).

-John

---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscribe@subversion.tigris.org
For additional commands, e-mail: users-help@subversion.tigris.org
Received on Sun May 22 14:04:17 2005

This is an archived mail posted to the Subversion Users mailing list.

This site is subject to the Apache Privacy Policy and the Apache Public Forum Archive Policy.