bug#60731: configure does not check for space behind "-l"

[Christian Weiss]

Dear all,

 

I have an issue which relates to the parsing of libraries for the linking step.

To reproduce this error, I have used automake 2.71 and OpenMPI 4.1.2

Consider this configure.ac:

 

AC_INIT([bug_mpi], [0], [dummy])

AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE

AC_PROG_CC

AC_PROG_FC

AC_PROG_CXX

LT_INIT

AC_CONFIG_FILES([Makefile])

AC_OUTPUT

 

And Makefile.am:

 

lib_LTLIBRARIES = libtest.la

libtest_la_SOURCES = test_f.f90 test_c.c

 

i.e. a library is supposed to be created from a C and a Fortran source file. The explicit form of the source files is irrelevant.

 

I configure and build with MPI: ./configure CC=mpicc FC=mpif90 CXX=mpic++

Which leads to the following error message:

 

/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -l-L/opt/bm/gcc-10.2.0/lib/gcc/x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/10.2.0

 

This is due to empty “-l” commands in the linker command. I could find out that this originates from the call of  “mpif90 -v”, which configure uses to create the list of  libraries to link. Explicitly, in my case I get

 

mpif90 -v test.f90 2>&1 | grep Driving

Driving: /opt/bm/gcc-10.2.0/bin/gfortran -v test.f90 -I/opt/bm/hpcx-v2.10-gcc-MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5-redhat8-cuda11-gdrcopy2-nccl2.11-x86_64/hpcx-rebuild-gcc-9.2.0-mt.sh/include -pthread -I/opt/bm/hpcx-v2.10-gcc-MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5-redhat8-cuda11-gdrcopy2-nccl2.11-x86_64/hpcx-rebuild-gcc-9.2.0-mt.sh/lib -L/opt/bm/hpcx-v2.10-gcc-MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5-redhat8-cuda11-gdrcopy2-nccl2.11-x86_64/hpcx-rebuild-gcc-9.2.0-mt.sh/lib -Wl,-rpath -Wl,/opt/bm/hpcx-v2.10-gcc-MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5-redhat8-cuda11-gdrcopy2-nccl2.11-x86_64/hpcx-rebuild-gcc-9.2.0-mt.sh/lib -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -lmpi_usempif08 -lmpi_usempi_ignore_tkr -lmpi_mpifh -lmpi -l gfortran -l m -shared-libgcc

 

Note the highlighted libraries which have a space between the “-l” and the library name. This string occurs in the postdeps variable of the libtool script.

I am aware that the existence of that extra space originates from OpenMPI. I have observed this with a few other OpenMPI installations, but other MPI implementations might not have it.

However, I found the following in the configure script:

 

  for p in `eval "$output_verbose_link_cmd"`; do

    case ${prev}${p} in

 

    -L* | -R* | -l*)

       # Some compilers place space between "-{L,R}" and the path.

       # Remove the space.

       if test $p = "-L" ||

          test $p = "-R"; then

         prev=$p

         continue

       fi

 

Here, you explicitly check for spaces within -L and -R statements. If I add “-l” to this, the build succeeds.

Maybe this check could be automatically generated, too?

 

Best regards,

Christian

 

Dr. Christian Weiss

Benchmark Analyst

Tel: +49 211 5369 126

 

NEC Deutschland GmbH

Geschäftsführer  Yuichi Kojima

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