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

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

Here is an update on the netbsd status.

On Mon, 24 Mar 2003, Alan W. Irwin wrote:

> 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 still a showstopper with Rafael's patched debian version of
libtool.

./get-drv-info xwin
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

./get-drv-info gd
jpeg:JPEG file:0:gd:40:jpeg
png:PNG file:0:gd:39:png

Rafael, can you recommend some later version of libtool for me
to try?  Are they close to their next release now?

Joao, do you have
any OSF1 results for using the

./get-drv-info xwin

command in the drivers directory?

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

The tcl issue is still not addressed.

I had some correspondence with Andrew about the freetype issue.  Apparently,
ft2build.h is considered an essential front end to more volatile changes
in other freetype2 headers so it should not be bypassed.  Since netbsd did
not include ft2build.h, our conclusion is freetype2 packaging is broken
for netbsd.  For all further netbsd tests I will turn off freetype using
--without-freetype.

Rafael's perl changes allowed me to try octave on netbsd, but I conclude
mkoctfile or the octave installation is broken there.  The compile step is
done with the same warning messages as on the Linux side of things, but the
link step is done with a bare

ld -o plplot_octave.oct plplot_octave.o -L../../src/.libs -lplplotd

command which generates the following messages:

ld: warning: cannot find entry symbol _start; defaulting to 00014d98
plplot_octave.o: In function `str_vec_compare(void const *, void const *)':
plplot_octave.o(.text+0x1aa4): undefined reference to `basic_string<char, string_char_traits<char>, __default_alloc_template<false, 0> >::compare(basic_string<char, string_char_traits<char>, __default_alloc_template<false, 0> > const &, unsigned long, unsigned long) const'
plplot_octave.o: In function `_arraylen(octave_value const &)':
plplot_octave.o(.text+0x1b00): undefined reference to `umul'
plplot_octave.o: In function `_wrap_pl_setcontlabelformat(octave_value_list const &, int)':
plplot_octave.o(.text+0x1e30): undefined reference to `octave_value::octave_value(void)'

plus hundreds more of these undefined references.

The equivalent command on the Linux side is fairly similar:

/usr/bin/g++ -shared -o plplot_octave.oct plplot_octave.o -L../../src/.libs -lplplotd

but of course with no warnings or messages.

mkoctfile is supposed to have some sort of cross-platform support, but as
far as I can tell when comparing the Linux and netbsd versions there is
little difference between them except the link command differences above.

It may be that in order to overcome this problem, we would have to go to a
more powerful cross-platform solution such as libtool.  Rafael and Joao have
not been keen on replacing mkoctfile with libtool to build the octave
interface to plplot, but if they change their minds (after the current
release; it is too late in this release cycle to try it), netbsd is a good
test platform for a libtool solution. For example, I am glad I moved from
the python native solution we had before (setup.py) to libtool to build the
python interface to plplot.  That seems to work fine for netbsd (and every
other platform where we have tried it) while the native method had lots of
ifs, ands, and buts from one platform to the next.

For now, I will avoid octave on netbsd by --disable-octave.

So the scorecard is two issues (freetype and octave) which we have resolved
by disabling since something is broken on netbsd, tcl/tk (still
to be resolved), and the segfault which continues to be a major worry.

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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