[Rd] AIX fails on startup with R-1.0.0

[Peter Dalgaard BSA]

Thomas J Vogels <tov@ece.cmu.edu> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> this is not a bug report since this may not be a problem with R per se. 
> 
> The current release of R (1.1.0) will compile cleanly on an AIX box
> (I have 4.3.2) but it will fail upon startup with an Illegal
> Instruction.  I've located the problem to be in do_strsplit when R
> calls regcomp.
> 
> This function is defined in regex.c.  However, the text from regex.o
> doesn't find its way into the executable, R.X11, since there's also a
> regcomp in /usr/lib/libc.a  Apparently, this confuses the system
> enough to completely lose its mind.  When regcomp in libc.a gets
> called, the stack is trashed which made this hard to debug.
> 
> A temporary fix is to remove the _first_ use of -lc from the linker
> command line.  This will affect the way the export symbols are
> defined.  Not sure yet whether this matters.
> 
> Why does this bug only show up on AIX?  Is this some weird posix trap?

We've discussed this recently (others know better than me). I think
you have it spot on, and the problem is that almost all other systems
than AIX will have the linker implicitly move -lc *after* the .o
files... AFAIR the permanent fix is equivalent to your temporary one.

-- 
   O__  ---- Peter Dalgaard             Blegdamsvej 3  
  c/ /'_ --- Dept. of Biostatistics     2200 Cph. N   
 (*) \(*) -- University of Copenhagen   Denmark      Ph: (+45) 35327918
~~~~~~~~~~ - (p.dalgaard@biostat.ku.dk)             FAX: (+45) 35327907
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