[ntp:hackers] lobopts

David L. Mills mills at udel.edu
Wed Jun 28 21:52:38 UTC 2006


Harlan,

As usual, I have more than a little irritation about this. The libopt is 
not in vanilla FreeBSD or Solaris; it is compiled and installed by the 
NTP build. You might have been talking about this for a year, but I 
didn't realize the library is installed on the machine after linking the 
executable. I don't like folks leaving things behind that might do 
something unexpected during operation, especially if it might conflict 
with something else. I assume it's left there for dynamic linking. If 
so, the default case should be static linking and an explicit option 
included for dynamic linking with warning that this will install libopt. 
This way the casual user like me doesn't get startled.

The commentary during installation is really confusing to ignorant folks 
like me. I don't want to know anything about libopt, libtool if all I 
need is build and install the thing. You say everybody in the developer 
corps knows all about these things. I'm not a developer in your sense; 
none of my students nor I can come even close to underanding the 
configure and build scripts. I write code, test and hand off to you 
guys. Just don't poop on my machine.

Dave

Harlan Stenn wrote:

> Dave,
>
>> This is probably my fault for not watching more closely.
>
>
> I have been telling folks about this for probably a year or so.
>
>> I just discovered libopt, which is included in the distribution. I have
>> no idea whether it is compatible with all the various systems that the
>> autoconfigure scripts deal with, but I assume it is friendly with VAX
>> and Windows at least.
>
>
> We know about some problems on Windows and they are being addressed. I
> have not heard about problems on VAX; if there are problems nobody has
> said anything.
>
>> At the moment, a make install fails on deacon due apparently to a
>> problem with libopt being installed in /usr/local/lib. If this library
>> is used only with ntpd (and apparently in sntp, as it appears twice), I
>> prefer it not be installed in my local files. I want nothing installed
>> in my local files that I do not explicitly permit. A make install should
>> only install the ntpd and associates.
>
>
> This might be due to libopts being built/used as a dynamic library.
>
> One can specify that the library is built static.
>
> I'll put more thought into this.
>
>> The make install that did succeed displayed comments about libtool that
>> would be very troubling for a green user. I am not green, but I have no
>> idea what those comments have to do or whether I should worry about it
>> or what I should do if what needs. This is not helpful.
>
>
> libtool is used by *many* projects and I would be very surprised to
> learn that anybody with a modicum of experience installing free software
> has not seen libtool in use before.
>
> More importantly, this code is in -dev and people are starting to test
> and use it - if somebody has a problem we'll learn about it and fix it.
>
> H




More information about the hackers mailing list