Re: [PATCH] Make oprofile build on recent SUSE

[Maynard J. <may...@us...>]

Andi Kleen wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 12:28:55PM -0500, Maynard Johnson wrote:
>> Andi Kleen wrote:
>>> The libbfd in recent suse always needs -lz added to link.
>>>
>>> This patch adds that to the configure script.
>>>
>>> Right now it requires to always have libz -- it would be probably
>>> better to check if bfd really needs it, but that was beyond
>>> my autoconf-fu.
>> We should not force users to install a package that isn't really needed.  I suspect you're encountering the same problem on SUSE that I had encountered with SLES 11.  Initially, SLES 11's binutils-devel package provided neither a libbfd.so symbolic link nor a libbfd.la.  Without either of those, oprofile's build (using libtool) was unable to automatically determine libbfd's dependency on libz.   After some discussion, I got Novell to see the light and to add a libbfd.la to the binutils-devel package, which allowed oprofile to build successfully.  Please check the binutils-devel package for SUSE and see if they're also missing the .la file.
> 
> It doesn't have one. Yes it's a distro bug. But that doesn't change the fact that oprofile should 
> build on it anyways, so oprofile should have a workaround for that distribution bug. Otherwise all 
> the SUSE users can't build it.
Generally speaking, I don't think any OSS project should be putting in workarounds for distro bugs, but since an easy, non-intrusive fix can be made for this, I agree that we shouldn't make users suffer.  But as I said in an earlier reply, the fix you posted results in every user having to install libz whether they truly need it or not.  I've attached a patch here that adds "-lz" to BFD_LIBS only if necessary.  Can you test this out on the SUSE box where you saw this problem?

Thanks.
-Maynard
> 
> -Andi
>