[Libunwind-devel] libunwind on x86 issues

[Jörn Engel]

At first glance, libunwind looks like the perfect solution to my
problem, which is essentially a userspace port of the linux kernel
dump_stack() function.  But there are some problems...

One of them is the mail server.  It responds to pings, but ports 25 and
80 are dead.  David, do you know the correct person to inform about
this?

Having binaries shipped with my distro (Debian) would be perfect, but
they only have ia64 binaries.  So I tried to download the latest git and
compile it myself.

README explains the usual ./configure; make; make install procedure.
But there is no ./configure.  README was last touched in 2007.  Not a
good starting point, it appears.

There is a configure.in, along with Makefile.am.  However, no
documentation about the usage and my memories are faint.  And painful -
I had hoped never to touch autoconf/automake again.  Oh well, here we
go.

$ autoconf
configure.in:11: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE
      If this token and others are legitimate, please use
m4_pattern_allow.
      See the Autoconf documentation.
configure.in:12: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_MAINTAINER_MODE
configure.in:13: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_CONFIG_HEADER
configure.in:20: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_PROG_LIBTOOL
configure.in:21: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_PROG_AS
configure.in:22: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_PROG_CC_C_O
configure.in:74: error: possibly undefined macro: AM_CONDITIONAL

Not a good sign.  Maybe it works in spite of the problems.

$ ./configure 
configure: error: cannot find install-sh or install.sh in config "."/config

Doesn't look much better.  And I won't even try to understand what went
wrong.  autoconf/automake internals are a pain I can happily live
without.  So maybe automake works in spite of these discouraging
messages?

$ automake
[249 lines spewed at me.  I won't quote them all]

About half of them look like purely informational (object `foo.lo'
created by `bar/foo.c'), the other half look like error messages.  All
on stderr.  No Makefile.in created and more importantly nothing remotely
resembling a compiler was ever invoked.

So how _do_ I build this library?

At least this excursion explained the question of why there are no x86
libunwind packages for debian.

Jörn

-- 
Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
-- Donald Knuth