Re: MXE Octave: "... has no symbols" warning under Mac OS X

[Anirudha Bose]

On Tue, Aug 27, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Alexander Hansen <address@hidden> wrote:

On 8/27/13 4:58 AM, Ben Abbott wrote:

On Aug 27, 2013, at 4:26 AM, Anirudha Bose wrote:

I have been working on reusing mxe-octave [1] to natively build Octave for Mac OS X. I have been able to complete the build process for the target i686-apple-darwin11, but the executable usr/bin/octave doesn't launch Octave. Here is the error I see.

dyld: Library not loaded: libcholmod.so
   Referenced from: /Users/mac6-user1/./mxe-octave/usr/bin/octave
   Reason: image not found
Trace/BPT trap: 5

I tried to trace back the error and saw that the library libcholmod.so belongs to the package suitesparse. The following is a part of the log of suitesparse,  which I think is responsible for the above error.

ar rv  libcholmod.a cholmod_aat.o cholmod_add.o cholmod_band.o cholmod_change_factor.o cholmod_common.o cholmod_complex.o cholmod_copy.o cholmod_dens$
ar: creating archive libcholmod.a
/opt/local/bin/ranlib: file: libcholmod.a(cholmod_ccolamd.o) has no symbols
/opt/local/bin/ranlib: file: libcholmod.a(cholmod_csymamd.o) has no symbols
/opt/local/bin/ranlib: file: libcholmod.a(cholmod_metis.o) has no symbols
/opt/local/bin/ranlib: file: libcholmod.a(cholmod_nesdis.o) has no symbols
/opt/local/bin/ranlib: file: libcholmod.a(cholmod_camd.o) has no symbols
/opt/local/bin/ranlib: file: libcholmod.a(cholmod_l_ccolamd.o) has no symbols
/opt/local/bin/ranlib: file: libcholmod.a(cholmod_l_csymamd.o) has no symbols
/opt/local/bin/ranlib: file: libcholmod.a(cholmod_l_metis.o) has no symbols
/opt/local/bin/ranlib: file: libcholmod.a(cholmod_l_nesdis.o) has no symbols
/opt/local/bin/ranlib: file: libcholmod.a(cholmod_l_camd.o) has no symbols


I suppose the problem is because Mac OS "ar" is not standard. I have also noticed these warnings with other packages too. Can anyone tell me how to get a proper build under Mac OS X?

[1] http://hg.octave.org/mxe-octave

- Anirudha

MacOSX's toolchain avoids the use of static libraries (I assume to avoid violating GNU licenses).  That is likely at the root of the problem.

In any event, I expect that both Fink and Macports include an "ar" with their basic installation.

Ben

You assume incorrectly in the case of Fink. :-)  We use the system's "ar".

It looks to me like the problem could be that /Users/mac6-user1/./mxe-octave/usr/bin/octave wants to link "libcholmod.so", which would be /Users/mac6-user1/./mxe-octave/usr/bin/libcholmod.so .  You can check this scenario using "otool -L /Users/mac6-user1/./mxe-octave/usr/bin/octave" .

This is exactly the reason why I am seeing the above errors. I am using install_name_tool for changing the paths, but is there any way to automate this job? The errors exist in too many executables and shared libraries to be done manually one by one. I also recompiled Octave with a new LDFLAG -headerpad_max_install_names to reserve enough space for changing all dynamic shared library paths.

--
Alexander Hansen, Ph.D.
Fink User Liaison
My package updates: http://finkakh.wordpress.com/

- Anirudha