[Plplot-devel] netbsd portability effort status--- one showstopper and 3 other problems

[Alan W. I. <ir...@be...>]

Here is the current status of plplot on netbsd.

There is one issue that is a real showstopper for netbsd (and perhaps other
unices).  The ./get-drv-info helper application segfaults when it tries to
obtain information about the xwin driver.  This is a really quite simple
routine that works for all other drivers (although I don't have a chance to
try it on tk because of the issue below).

There is nothing obviously wrong with the xwin.so linking.  When I look for
undefined symbols using nm -u, I can spot obvious libX11, libm, and
libplplot symbols, plus a very few I don't recognize.  However, those
libraries are all linked in, and there are no obvious error or warning
messages associated with the linking process (which I believe there would be
if another library needed to be specified by the link to resolve some
undefined symbols).

That leaves the most obvious candidate for the ./get-drv-info segfault as
the libltdl library that is used by ./get-drv-info and which comes with my
libtool version (libtool-1.4.3 straight from FSF).  Besides the segfault
there are also a number of valgrind "Conditional jump or move depends on
uninitialised value(s)" associated with running ./get-drv-info on Linux.
These message at best indicate the FSF guys haven't tried valgrind on their
libltdl library and at worst may indicate a real memory management problem
with that library. Rafael, we should do a test also with your libtool
(patched Debian libtool-1.4.3) as soon as you finish the perl stuff and can
make a tarball. Also, if that doesn't work, we should discuss the
possibility of trying later libtool versions.

Here are some additional issues that need to be addressed but which I can
bypass for now using --disable-tcl --without-freetype --disable-octave

* tcl/tk does not work because of the tcl/tk configuration design problems I
described here previously (and which I hope Maurice can help to sort out).

* freetype does not work because ft2build.h (which is #included by our
plfreetype software) apparently is not part of the netbsd distribution of
freetype2 (version 2.1.3 which is certainly pretty up-to-date).  I suspect
this is a deprecated file in any case since all it seems to do is #include
<freetype/config/ftheader.h>.  Andrew, do you forsee any problem if we replace
#include <ft2build.h> by #include <freetype/config/ftheader.h> in
plfreetype.h?

* octave doesn't work because perl scripts refer to the wrong perl path
#!/usr/bin/perl (rather than /usr/pkg/bin/perl) on netbsd.  One possibility
is to change all our perl scripts so they all start with #!/usr/bin/env
perl, but Rafael has decided a better way (and I agree) is simply to invoke
perl explicitly by using $(PERL) scriptname_whatever throughout our
Makefile.am files.

So the netbsd score is 3 avoided problems (all of which could be sorted out
quickly) and one showstopper.  If there is some adventurous soul here, who
would like to help out with the showstopper problem, it would be most
interesting to see whether there are segfaults with get-drv-info on any
other Linux or Unix platform.  Joao, you have voiced a few concerns for
OSF1, but they don't seem to involve get-drv-info.  Can you please confirm
that helper application is working well (especially for xwin and tk) for
OSF1 as well as SuSe?

BTW, the test week for our users is currently scheduled starting 12th April
with the actual release scheduled on the 19th so I think it is time in any
case for other developers besides Joao and me to start doing some testing of
the CVS snapshot tarballs on all platforms they have access to.  Ideally, we
would have all known portability issues solved on the platforms accessible
to us as a group before our users put the release candidate tarball through
its paces during test week.

Alan
__________________________
Alan W. Irwin
email: ir...@be...
phone: 250-727-2902

Astronomical research affiliation with Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Victoria (astrowww.phys.uvic.ca).

Programming affiliations with the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and
Analysis (www.cccma.bc.ec.gc.ca) and the PLplot scientific plotting software
package (plplot.org).

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