Re: Building modules on AIX

[Daniel Sands]

Trying again since I left the mailing list out of the reply...

On Fri, 2010-08-20 at 20:13 +0200, Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> * Daniel Sands wrote on Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 08:11:01PM CEST:
> > Yeah I'm just trying to avoid the RTL because it sometimes gums up the
> > works.  APR started with -brtl and it caused a bunch of headaches trying
> > to make that work--it built both the .so's and the static libraries, and
> > APR-UTIL linked to the static libraries instead of the .so's.  Maybe
> > the .la generated by the .a version took priority on the install.
> 
> Can you try
>   ./configure --disable-static LDFLAGS=-Wl,-brtl

I'll see what I can do.

> 
> ?  I can otherwise look into this, but it'll be a few days.

Thanks.  In all fairness, it is possible to dlopen a .a, but you have to
know the name of the shared object within the archive that you want,
then call dlopen with the file name of "archive.a(object.o)" and add the
RTLD_MEMBER flag.  Not the most portable way to do things, but AIX has
always been an odd beast.

I actually hacked Cyrus SASL to do just that, since its libraries depend
on plugins to do the authentication and so would need to load the plugin
module that corresponds with the machine word size of the program they
were linked to.

But in the normal case, AIX modules should probably stick with .so since
they are intended to be dlopened by only one particular program.  At
least that's my understanding of the intent of -module ;)

> 
> > I'm ultimately trying to build Subversion, but I'm caught in Dependency
> > Hell.
> 
> I'm sorry.  Aren't there pre-built binary packages for APR available?

I found a toolchain of RPM's on oss4aix.org, even up to Subversion, but
when I tried to run it, it got caught in an infinite loop initializing
iconv.  I couldn't debug it any further since the debug info was
stripped, so I started trying to build it myself using the SRPM's in an
attempt to recover the debug info.  They may build and run fine on AIX
5, but I've had to do a lot of hacking to even make them compile on AIX
6.