25 October 2004

Drive Mount Applet

The new drive mount applet is now checked into the HEAD branch of gnome-applets, so will be in Gnome 2.10. There are a few things left to do, such as making it possible to open the file manager as well as unmounting/ejecting it. I did up a screenshot showing what it looks like as an applet.

Libtool

Finally managed to reproduce a particular libtool bug that people have reported on and off. It does show why some people decide that .la files are evil, since it doesn't occur when people delete those files ...

A reduced test case can be found here. The problem occurs when you have multiple copies of a library in your linker library search path with associated .la files. In the test case, there are the following libraries:

  • libfoo.so and libfoo.la in the directory /A. This is the library we want to link to.
  • libfoo.so and libfoo.la in the directory /B. We don't want to link to this one, because it is old.
  • libbar.so and libbar.la in the directory /B.

Let's say I then try to link an app that needs libbar and the new version of libfoo, and happen to use the following link line:

libtool --mode=link gcc -o main main.c -lbar -L/A -L/B -lfoo

In the absense of libtool, this would result in us linking against /B/libbar.so and /A/libfoo.so (since /A comes before /B in the search path).

However, libtool ends up doing something quite different. When it sees -lbar, it notices that there is a libbar.la in /B, expands that argument to the full path name of the actual library (/B/libbar.so), and prepends /B to the library search path. This means that when it gets round to processing -lfoo, it finds /B/libfoo.la instead of /A/libfoo.la, and links to the wrong library.

If this sounds like an obscure bug, note that it also happens if we replace /B with /usr/lib. In this case, we don't even need the -L/usr/lib argument. So the following command results in linking with /usr/lib/libfoo.so instead of /A/libfoo.so:

libtool --mode=link gcc -o main main.c -lbar -L/A -lfoo

This sort of situation is quite common when trying to build some software into a separate prefix that is also provided by the OS, when you are relying on a few libraries installed in /usr/lib with .la files.

After putting together the test case I tested it out in the latest development release (1.9f), and it appears that the problem has been fixed. Given that the libtool developers are so close to a 2.0 release, I don't know whether they would bother putting out another 1.5.x release to fix the problem.

So if you do run into the problem, some possible solutions are:

  1. Upgrade to libtool-1.9f. I'm not sure how good an idea this is if you are producing tarballs, since they will be packaged with the development release too.
  2. Remove all the .la files in /usr/lib. Some distributors seem to take this route (eg. Ximian/Novell and Red Hat).