Comments on: Fixing undefined library symbols for compiling PHP 5.2.8

By: lholcombe

lholcombe — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:31:56 +0000

Towering heaps of thanks for this info. My first issues were with iconv. Then came openssl. And then libxml. I tried dangerous things like renaming the library and header files, but it just became a mess. Modifying the makefile as recommended fixed everything. I now have PostgreSQL support on my MacBookPro, something which should be standard. I agree that PHP is at fault for this, but I wouldn’t expect them to fix it, since it isn’t really a ‘bug’. More like a feature that inconveniences many Mac users. Anyway, thanks again for your solution, I appreciate you taking the time so I don’t have to.

By: yiming

yiming — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:34:51 +0000

Good to know. The devs must have fixed it in more recent versions of the compilation system. Furthermore, on OS X 10.6, the system libxml version shipped is recent enough that the problem doesn’t crop up again — but you may still be linking whatever is in /usr/lib. When in doubt, use otool -L to check which library you linked against.

At the time this post was written, –with-libxml-dir had no effect, because -L/usr/lib was hardcoded to appear in front of anything you specified at link time. As long as there was a incompatible version of libxml in /usr/lib, you won’t be linking against the custom-compiled version.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 22:17:12 +0000

I found that compiling my own libxml2 into a non system directory then using the –with-libxml-dir= compile flag fixed my problems.

By: Newbie

Newbie — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:44:56 +0000

Firstly, Thank you for the extremely clear explanation of what’s going on. I figure if I found my way to this post someone else with my problem will too so I wanted to comment how this helped me. I’m running mac os 10.5.8 with apache 2.2 and trying to install php 5.3.1 with curl. It was giving me undefined symbols errors because it couldn’t find iconv. I googled and found my way here. I tried this solution but it wasn’t working. So I tried decompressing my php source download again and running ./configure… from a fresh directory and it worked. I know some of you may be laughing at me or thinking that there was some other fancy command line thingy I could do to refresh the directory but if it gave me trouble it may give someone else trouble so I’m posting it here!

Further reading on this topic I found here:
http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=48195
http://jspr.tndy.me/2009/07/php-5-3-iconv-osx-symbols-missing-_libiconv/
and those two links at the top of this post

By: Apache, PHP, Zend Debugger and Snow Leopard are conspiring to kill me – Tom Sartain | Blog

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 18:59:28 +0000

[...] MH_BUNDLE_FLAGS needs to be moved to the end of the group at line 155 otherwise I get more undefined errors [...]

By: GSV_SleeperService

GSV_SleeperService — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 19:36:12 +0000

Oh my goodness, thank you _so_ much; I’d been driven right round the bend by this. Your solution (and your analysis of the arrogance on the part of the
PHP developers) is, as has already been said, spot on.

By: yiming

yiming — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:12:58 +0000

Yeah, I had the same inclination. Initially I was convinced that I’d somehow mis-compiled libxml and spent 15 minutes recompiling libxml

My fix is just a quick way to get past the problem, so I didn’t submit a patch. To really fix the underlying problem, the build system should try to link the library by full path when you specify your custom library path (gcc … /usr/local/lib/libxml.dylib) rather than using directory search ( as in gcc … -lxml ) This way, it will be sure to get the right library that you specifically told it to use, rather than always searching and finding the one living in the first -L path.

The point seems moot though — from the PHP bugzilla, they didn’t seem terribly interested in fixing the problem anyway (“you should only have one library!”)

By: RayRay

RayRay — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 19:25:58 +0000

Thanks for the in depth review of this issue. In retrospect, I should have looked at what the command line was obviously telling me, but since the configuration script allowed me to specify my library path I didn’t think that was being overlooked. I kept second guessing my install steps and not the php config script!

Has this been submitted as a patch to the php.net folks?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:13:51 +0000

Great Post! and you are analysis is spot on!

By: yiming

yiming — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:00:14 +0000

Ah, because it’s quite productive to be attacking your users anonymously when they reveal a potential shortcoming? I investigated this issue simply because its occurrence cost me personal productivity — which I could have been using on my day job or my hobby projects. The fact that others have reported the bug, and it has been declared invalid, suggests that even if I did put down time, effort, and expense to learn the intricacies of a build system, it would probably not be accepted anyway.

This entire blog has consisted of “workarounds for problems”, which I hope will be useful to others. However, at the end of the day, I neither enjoy nor get paid to fix compilation bugs in these packages, nor does my company depend upon any of these packages I’ve had trouble with. I have no particular incentive to learn the codebase to a project every time I run into a build problem; as you said, I’d rather be productive :p

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:15:06 +0000

You seem to have plenty of time writing arrogant blog posts. How about being productive and provide patches instead? Or is that too hard?

By: Carlos

Carlos — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 07:09:52 +0000

Wonderful, thanks!

By: Renton

Renton — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 18:41:05 +0000

Thankz a lot mate… really thanks!

By: Sanstenarios

Sanstenarios — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 19:18:36 +0000

Thanx so much for this yiming, had some lack of knowledge concerning makefiles ;
well, still have, but it goes better for php compiling now;