182086 - ranlib needs to be rerun after static libraries are moved to the destination directory.

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(NSS :: Build, defect, P1)

Description

[Wan-Teh Chang]

One difference between Mac OS X and Unix is that on Mac OS X,
ranlib needs to be rerun after static libraries are moved to
the destination directory.

In the coreconf build system, we need to rerun ranlib on the
*.a files after the 'import' rule unpacks the mdbinary.jar file.

Comment 1

[Wan-Teh Chang]

Attachment: Proposed patch

Ulf, could you test this patch?

I was hoping that we could invoke ranlib in the import.pl script,
but I found that the import.pl script is very general and doesn't
know anything about the structure of the mozilla/dist/<platform>.OBJ
directory.  So we have to invoke ranlib after the import.pl script
has run.

Comment 2

[Wan-Teh Chang]

Attachment: Proposed patch v2

The previous patch contains an unrelated change.

Comment 3

[Wan-Teh Chang]

I tested my patch and verified that it works.

In the interest of time, I've checked in my patch so
that Ulf can start the NSS tip nightly build on Mac
OS X tonight.

I'd still appreciate a code review of my patch.

Comment 4

[Nelson Bolyard (seldom reads bugmail)]

Review comments: This patch (v2) looks correct.

I might have coded it 
    find $(SOURCE_MD_DIR)/lib -name "*.a" -print | xargs $(RANLIB) 
instead of 
    find $(SOURCE_MD_DIR)/lib -name "*.a" -exec $(RANLIB) {} \;

xargs will one RANLIB once for a bunch of .a files at once.  
-exec will run RANLIB once for each individual .a file.

If the number of expected .a files was large, it could make a performance 
difference, but since the number of .a files is probably small, this is 
probably not worth changing now.

One other issue with the xargs approach: if the pathnames have an spaces
in the directory or files names, then they need to be quoted so that xargs
will not break them into separate arguments.  To do that I sometimes use
this sed script:

    sed -e '/ /s/\(.*\)/"\1"/'

e.g. 

    find $(SOURCE_MD_DIR)/lib -name "*.a" -print | sed -e '/ /s/\(.*\)/"\1"/' \
| xargs $(RANLIB) 

Comment 5

[Wan-Teh Chang]

Here is an excerpt from "Mac OS X for Unix Geeks" by
Brian Jepson and Ernest E. Rothman, page 91:
    The creation of static libraries in Mac OS X is
    much the same as in Unix variants, with one
    exception. After installation in the destination
    directory, ranlib must be used to recatalog the
    newly installed archive libraries (i.e., the
    lib*.a files).

This is the best description I can find on this problem,
although a Google search turns up many reports of this
problem.

Marked the bug fixed.