Problems with iconv in base and static linking

Dimitry Andric dim at FreeBSD.org
Wed Aug 21 19:49:17 UTC 2013


Hi,

While packaging my just-rebuilt ports today, I noticed a strange message
occurring during the package creation stage:

$ sudo make -C /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/pkg repackage
===>  Building package for pkg-1.1.4_1
Creating package for pkg-1.1.4_1
Service unavailable$

In fact, *every* make package/repackage produces the "Service
unavailable" message.  The message is actually produced by the pkg(8)
command, which is run as follows:

/usr/local/sbin/pkg-static create -o /usr/ports/packages pkg-1.1.4_1

Now comes the interesting part: if you use /usr/local/sbin/pkg instead,
the "Service unavailable" message does *not* appear.

It turns out this is because pkg(8) uses libarchive, which is now
compiled with iconv support from base by default.  But the iconv in base
does *not* work properly in statically linked executables.  For example,
take this small program:

#include <err.h>
#include <iconv.h>

int main(void)
{
        iconv_t ic = iconv_open("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1");
        if (ic == (iconv_t)-1)
                err(1, "iconv_open failed");
        iconv_close(ic);
        return 0;
}

If you compile and link this statically, it will produce:

$ cc -static iconv-test.c -o iconv-test-static
$ ./iconv-test-static
iconv-test-static: iconv_open failed: Invalid argument
Service unavailable$

The reason for the message is that libc's iconv tries to dlopen(3) a
dynamic library in /usr/lib/i18n, which does not work in static
executables.

As a quick fix for pkg(8), we could build the static version of
libarchive without -DHAVE_ICONV and friends.  This also helps other
consumers of libarchive that link statically.

Of course, there may be other consumers of libc's iconv that might want
to link statically, so it should really be fixed there instead.  For
example, by not doing the dlopen, and failing gracefully.  Or maybe by
actually linking in (a subset of) the /usr/lib/i18n libraries.

-Dimitry



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