[Rd] Fix for foreign package segfault on Solaris 10 Intel

[Prof Brian Ripley]

Can you show us the output you get from building foreign, and explain 
how it comes to be linked against libavl?  I get (SunStudio 12)

cc -xc99 -G -L/opt/csw/lib -o foreign.so R_systat.o Rdbfread.o 
Rdbfwrite.o SASxport.o avl.o dbfopen.o file-handle.o format.o init.o 
minitab.o pfm-read.o sfm-read.o spss.o stataread.o

and ldd library/foreign/libs/foreign.so reveals no dependencies (and 
the R binary is not linked against libavl either).

I can see that linking against libavl could cause problems, but have 
no idea why that might be happening.


On Fri, 6 Mar 2009, Jeff Long wrote:

> Like a couple of other posters in the past year, I was seeing R 2.8.1 
> segfault in the foreign package on my Solaris 10 Intel system:
>
>      > library(foreign)
>
>      *** caught segfault ***
>      address fe1d5c70, cause 'invalid permissions'
>
>      Traceback:
>           1: .C("spss_init", PACKAGE = "foreign")
>           2: fun(...)
>
> This happened whether I built with gcc3, gcc4, or SunStudio 12.
>
> Using pstack I found that the code was crashing in avl_create(). Using truss 
> I found that identically named functions in the Solaris /lib/libavl.so.1 
> library were being used instead of the AVL functions provided in avl.c in the 
> foreign package. To verify, I replaced all of the "avl_" and "AVL_" patterns 
> in foreign/src/*.[ch] with "ravl_" and "RAVL_" respectively. Once I made this 
> change, loading the foreign package caused no further problems.
>
> An alternative workaround was a hack involving symlinks and LD_LIBRARY_PATH, 
> but that was not satisfactory. Since the foreign avl functions are 
> incompatible with the ones provided by the standard Sun library, this 
> approach has other potential gotchas.
>
> FYI.
>
> Jeff
>
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>

-- 
Brian D. Ripley,                  ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics,  http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford,             Tel:  +44 1865 272861 (self)
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