[CoinBinary] [BuildTools] BuildTools issues for debian packages

[Ted Ralphs]

I've been working on updating the debian packages for Clp, Cbc, and

> related Coin projects, which are out of date and no longer of interest
> to the previous maintainer. I wanted to raise a few issues with the
> build system which I've run into during this process:
>

It's great that someone is picking this up. We have been working with
someone at Fedora and have packages going through the approval process
there. It would be great to have the same for Debian. We'e made a lot of
changes over the past few years to accommodate this kind of packaging and
I'd be happy to help you through the process.


> 1) I'm unable to regenerate the autotools-generated files. Debian
> prefers to rerun autotools so that newer architectures like ARM64 are
> properly supported. I've tried using the `run_autotools` script, but
> the libtool version used (1.5.22) is no longer available within
> debian. The older versions of autoconf (2.59) and automake (1.9.6) are
> okay since they are still actively maintained as debian packages.
>

It's pretty easy to build the proper version of libtool from source, but I
guess the issue is not that you can't get that version of libtool---it's
just that it's not supported as a debian package, right? It is on our TODO
list to get the build system working with more recent version of the auto
tools, but we have a lot of patches and fixes that are specific to those
particular version of the auto tools and it looks like some work to unwind
all of that. We do plan to do this, however. Finding the time is another
thing...


> 2) "make install" fails when DESTDIR is not the same as the
> installation prefix (and pkg-config is installed). To reproduce,
> building OSI, for example:
> $ ./configure
> $ make
> $ mkdir installdir
> $ make DESTDIR=`pwd`/installdir install
> ...
> make  install-data-hook
> make[4]: Entering directory `/home/mlubin/osi/Osi-0.106.1/CoinUtils'
>
> PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/home/mlubin/osi/Osi-0.106.1/lib64/pkgconfig:/home/mlubin/osi/Osi-0.106.1/lib/pkgconfig:/home/mlubin/osi/Osi-0.106.1/share/pkgconfig:
> \
>     pkg-config --libs coinutils >
>
> /home/mlubin/osi/Osi-0.106.1/installdir/home/mlubin/osi/Osi-0.106.1/share/coin/doc/CoinUtils/coinutils_addlibs.txt
> Package coinutils was not found in the pkg-config search path.
> Perhaps you should add the directory containing `coinutils.pc'
> to the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable
> No package 'coinutils' found
>
>
> Debian packages are built using DESTDIR, so I've had to patch this to
> remove this code. I might suggest simply not generating the
> *_addlibs.txt files, since these are redundant to pkg-config.
>

We didn't want to assume pkg-config was available and in fact, using
pkg-config in the build process seems to cause a lot of problems. For
examples, on Windows, if there are spaces in the path, this causes some
problems. It's also sort of a pain figuring out whether the version of
pkg-config you'reworking with understands POSIX paths or Windows paths.
Overall, I would say that the best thing would be just to disable the use
of pkg-config during configuration on all platforms. This is one more
reason to do that. If you use the option "--disable-pkg-config", does that
fix the problem?


> 3) Shared libraries do not properly list their runtime dependencies;
> e.g. libClp.so does not, but should, depend on libCoinUtils.so,
> libbz2.so, liblapack.so, etc., as reported by the ldd tool. This has
> been raised a few times:
> http://list.coin-or.org/pipermail/clp/2012-June/001265.html,
> http://list.coin-or.org/pipermail/coin-discuss/2008-October/003480.html,
> and in a private communication with Stefan Vigerske this past
> December. While this isn't too difficult to deal with when developing
> compiled applications, it significantly complicates using the shared
> library from within dynamic languages like Python or Julia (relatedly,
> I am the maintainer of the Clp and Cbc interfaces for Julia). The
> Debian package system also uses shared library dependencies to infer
> package dependencies, and this procedure is broken for coin libraries.
>

 Yes, this is a problem for the Fedora packing as well and we had on our
TODO list to deal with this, but it will also require some work. For
Python, I parse the _addlibs.txt files to find dependencies and this works
fine. If you look at the setup script for Dippy, you will see how it's done:

https://projects.coin-or.org/Dip/browser/trunk/Dip/setup.py

All of the issues you raise are on the TODO list and need to be dealt with.
We always welcome any help with it :).

Cheers,

Ted
-- 
Dr. Ted Ralphs
Associate Professor, Lehigh University
(610) 628-1280
ted 'at' lehigh 'dot' edu
coral.ie.lehigh.edu/~ted
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