[tlbuild] icu build fails on FreeBSD-5/i386: problem with pthread lib?

[Peter Breitenlohner]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010, Nikola Le?i? wrote:

> The problem seems to be related to libpthread and all icu binaries are
> linked against it. Please find ldd info and gdb output against
> makeconv.core, gennames.core and genrb.core below.
>
> However, as far as I understand, icu components are not supposed to be
> linked against any threading library, according to the comment in the
> Build script. If that idea covers binaries as well, it does not happen
> on FreeBSD.

Hi Nikola,

it certainly should, but doesn't happen for Linux either.

> (Anyway, any use of -lpthread is incorrect on FreeBSD; -pthread should
> be use instead. The official port (devel/icu4) treats icu sources like
> this:
> 1. patches config/mh-bsd-gcc to use PTHREAD_CFLAGS as THREADSCPPFLAGS,
>   which defaults to nothing, e.g. -D_REENTRANT is removed;

Can you patch your working copy accordingly and try if that works?

Why has this not been reported back to the ICU people? Or has it?

> 2. patches runConfigureICU like this:

TL uses configure, not runConfigureICU.

> 3. use '--enable-threads=no' or '--enable-weak-threads' depending on
>   user's settings.)

maybe we should always use that when building ICU.  For the moment, can you
try to add '--disable-threads' (or '--enable-threads=no') at the top-level
and see what happens.

> What can be done here? Is linking to pthread lib necessary or
> intentional?

I don't think we need threaded ICU libraries for TeX Live.

Regards
Peter Breitenlohner <peb at mppmu.mpg.de>