Build Tricks

This page collects some known build errors and trick how to fix them

Platform-independent

Running foreign executables

The build environment provided by BinaryBuilder is a x86_64-linux-musl, and it can run executables for the following platforms: x86_64-linux-musl, x86_64-linux-gnu, i686-linux-gnu. For all other platforms, if the build system tries to run a foreign executable you'll get an error, usually something like

./foreign.exe: line 1: ELF��
                       @@xG@8@@@@@@���@�@@����A�A����A�A���@�@: not found
./foreign.exe: line 1: syntax error: unexpected end of file (expecting ")")

This is one of worst cases, as there isn't a simple solution. You have to look into the build process to see if running the executable can be skipped (see for example the patch to not run dot in #351), or replaced by something else. If the executable is a compile-time only utility, try to build it with the native compiler (see for example the patch to build a native mkdefs in #351)

FreeBSD

undefined reference to `backtrace_symbols'

If compilation fails because of the following errors

undefined reference to `backtrace_symbols'
undefined reference to `backtrace'

then you need to link to execinfo:

if [[ "${target}" == *-freebsd* ]]; then
    export LDFLAGS="-lexecinfo"
fi
./configure --prefix=${prefix} --build=${MACHTYPE} --host=${target}
make -j ${nprocs}
make install

See for example #354.

Windows

Libtool refuses to build shared library because of undefined symbol

When building for Windows, sometimes libtool refuses to build the shared library because of undefined symbols. When this happens, compilation is successful but BinaryBuilder's audit can't find the expected LibraryProducts.

In the log of compilation you can usually find messages like

libtool: warning: undefined symbols not allowed in i686-w64-mingw32 shared libraries; building static only

or

libtool:   error: can't build i686-w64-mingw32 shared library unless -no-undefined is specified

In these cases you have to pass the -no-undefined option to the linker, as explicitly suggested by the second message.

Doing this properly is a bit tricky: I couldn't make CFLAGS=-Wl,-no-undefined work, instead setting LDFLAGS=-no-undefined before ./configure make this fail (because it will run a command like cc -no-undefined conftest.c, which upsets the compiler). What I use to do is to pass LDFLAGS=-no-undefined only to make:

FLAGS=()
if [[ "${target}" == *-mingw* ]]; then
    FLAGS+=(LDFLAGS="-no-undefined")
fi
./configure --prefix=${prefix} --build=${MACHTYPE} --host=${target}
make -j ${nprocs} "${FLAGS[@]}"
make install

See for example #170, #354.