Libtool needs to get BSD-format (or MS-format) output out of the system
nm, so that it can scan generated object files for symbol names for
-export-symbols-regex support. Some nms need specific flags to turn on
BSD-formatted output, so libtool checks for this in its AC_PATH_NM.
Unfortunately the code to do this has a pair of interlocking flaws:
- it runs the test by doing an nm of /dev/null. Some platforms
reasonably refuse to do an nm on a device file, but before now this
has only been worked around by assuming that the error message has a
specific textual form emitted by Tru64 nm, and that getting this
error means this is Tru64 nm and that nm -B would work to produce
BSD-format output, even though the test never actually got anything
but an error message out of nm -B. This is fixable by nm'ing *nm
itself* (since we necessarily have a path to it).
- the test is entirely skipped if NM is set in the environment, on the
grounds that the user has overridden the test: but the user cannot
reasonably be expected to know that libtool wants not only nm but
also flags forcing BSD-format output. Worse yet, one such "user" is
the top-level Cygnus configure script, which neither tests for
nor specifies any BSD-format flags. So platforms needing BSD-format
flags always fail to set them when run in a Cygnus tree, breaking
-export-symbols-regex on such platforms. Libtool also needs to
augment $LD on some platforms, but this is done unconditionally,
augmenting whatever the user specified: the nm check should do the
same.
One wrinkle: if the user has overridden $NM, a path might have been
provided: so we use the user-specified path if there was one, and
otherwise do the path search as usual. (If the nm specified doesn't
work, this might lead to a few extra pointless path searches -- but
the test is going to fail anyway, so that's not a problem.)
(Tested with NM unset, and set to nm, /usr/bin/nm, my-nm where my-nm is a
symlink to /usr/bin/nm on the PATH, and /not-on-the-path/my-nm where
*that* is a symlink to /usr/bin/nm.)
ChangeLog
2021-09-27 Nick Alcock <nick.alcock@oracle.com>
PR libctf/27967
* libtool.m4 (LT_PATH_NM): Try BSDization flags with a user-provided
NM, if there is one. Run nm on itself, not on /dev/null, to avoid
errors from nms that refuse to work on non-regular files. Remove
other workarounds for this problem. Strip out blank lines from the
nm output.
5ab7dd14e1