Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!umich!don
From: don@zippy.eecs.umich.edu (Don Winsor)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: Production perl 3.0 available
Summary: cure for undefined symbol gethostent
Message-ID: <609@zip.eecs.umich.edu>
Date: 24 Oct 89 02:10:50 GMT
References: <10077@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>
Reply-To: don@zip.eecs.umich.edu.UUCP (Don Winsor)
Organization: University of Michigan EECS Dept., Ann Arbor, MI
Lines: 29

In article <10077@stag.math.lsa.umich.edu> emv@math.lsa.umich.edu
(Edward Vielmetti) writes:
> ... system is a sun 4/60 running sunos 4.0.3 w/the uunet
> sun-fixes version of libc.so that has name server support in it.
> ... perl on this system complies OK but refuses to link with
> the error from ld about undefined symbol -- _gethostent.
> I think this problem flew by the list once
> before -- something about libraries -- but I lost it
> between the time I saw it and the time I need it.

I ran into this problem too.  The key is that the version of
libc.so that has the name server support in it doesn't have
the gethostent subroutine, since gethostent inherently refers
to an /etc/hosts file and not to a name server.  The cure is
that when you run Configure and it asks if you want to edit
config.sh, go ahead and edit it (!vi config.sh).  Find the line:

d_gethent='define'

and change it to:

d_gethent='undef'

This will build a version of perl that doesn't reference the
nonexistent gethostent subroutine.  The one other quirk I found
with perl on a Sun-4 is that the file "walk.c" in the "x2p"
subdirectory wont compile if you use a -O3 or a -O4 optimization
level.  I worked around it by compiling this at -O2 manually, and
then running make with -O4 optimization to compile everythine else.