Tag: libtool

Subversion and undefined symbols

Posted on by yiming

This is fast turning out to be a blog about compiling open source software. Maybe I should change the title.

You may get this error while trying to compile Subversion 1.5.2:
ld: Undefined symbols:
_svn_fs_txn_root_base_revision referenced from libsvn expected to be defined in libsvn
_svn_fs_change_txn_props referenced from libsvn expected to be defined in libsvn
_svn_fs_get_mergeinfo referenced from libsvn expected to be defined in libsvn
_svn_fs_recover referenced from libsvn expected to be defined in libsvn
_svn_fs_upgrade referenced from libsvn expected to be defined in libsvn
_svn_fs_node_origin_rev referenced from libsvn expected to be defined in libsvn
/usr/bin/libtool: internal link edit command failed
make: *** [subversion/libsvn_ra_local/libsvn_ra_local-1.la] Error 1

Turns out there may be a bug in the libtool script shipped with the source tarball, under certain circumstances with OS X 10.4, that causes it to fail to link. Ah, libtool, you make my life so much harder sometimes.

If you copy /usr/bin/glibtool over $SRCDIR/libtool (that is, into the directory for the subversion source code, replacing the one that is placed there by the package itself), the package should compile with no further complaints. make test also shows success on all tests, so this seems a satisfactory solution.

UPDATE 1/31/2009
I’ve been informed in the comments that MacPorts may rely on source compilation from tarball, and thus have this issue. If you’re having this issue with the MacPorts SVN package, please check out the advice in the comment section from farkinga, who has additional notes.

libpng12.*.dylib related compile failures on OS X 10.5

Posted on by yiming
broken libpng screenshot

If you’ve been having problems compiling various Unix packages on OS X 10.5.4, and that your compile run fails mysteriously with something like:

i686-apple-darwin9-gcc: /usr/X11/lib/libpng12.0.26.0.dylib: No such file or directory

One strange yet very likely explanation: your libtool archive file /usr/X11/lib/libpng12.la is lying about the location of the shared library for libpng12 — namely, that a file called /usr/X11/lib/libpng12.0.26.0.dylib exists and should be used for linking against libpng12. However, if you actually look in /usr/X11/lib, no such file exists – perhaps you might have libpng.0.24.0.dylib, but not .26. Therefore, packages that make use of this incorrect libtool archive metadata are suitably confused, causing the compiler to bail out when trying to link against this non-existent file.

Since libtool archive (.la) files are text-based, you can open it up in emacs. The quick and dirty fix to this is to simply change the offending library_names and the current and age properties to the correct numbers. In my case, the libpng sitting in /usr/X11/lib was .24, and so I string-replaced all the values in those three properties from 26 to 24. The compilation then proceeded normally.

The long term solution, of course, is to track down what put a wrong .la file there in the first place. I suspect Xcode 3.1 and Mac OS X SDK 10.5, which shipped with the latest iPhone SDK.

UPDATED 9/8/2008:
In the comments section, I’ve been informed that the X11SDK package in Xcode 3.1 in the culprit. Thanks Anonymous!