FAQ?, dynamic-link.h problem

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2004 at 10:56:47AM -0400, Jaime Davila wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Is there a FAQ for this list? I am trying to solve a problem on my FC1 
> installation that others have probably seen. I googled the error 
> message, and searched on the fedora archives, but haven't found an 
> answer. (google did show others having the problem, but no answers to it).
> 
> The error message is 'jazz: dynamic-link.h:57: elf_get_dynamic_info: 
> Assertion `! "bad dynamic tag"' failed.
> Aborted' when using the jazz MIDI editing program. I am trying to use a 
> precompiled version of jazz, since the source code is around 3 years old 
> and depends on a previous version of the alsa software (the current alsa 
> version does not allow jazz to compile).

That means you are trying to run a statically linked program, which uses
NSS or dlopen.
The program has been linked against a buggy glibc (that did not expect
unknown dynamic tags), with assertions enabled
(something that non-development libraries shouldn't have).

Generally, statically linked programs that use NSS/dlopen
(which means they need to dynamically load system shared libraries)
are least portable.
They are only supported as long as they are compiled/linked against the
same glibc against which they are run.
You may be lucky in other cases too, but certainly no guarantees.

You might try investigating what glibc has the program been linked against,
downloading the corresponding glibc, unpacking it in say ~/staticnss
and then trying to run the program with
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=~/staticnss/lib jazz

It is always better to avoid statical linking if the program is not
self-contained (depends on system libraries too),
if you want to avoid relying on some particular library (in this case
I guess that would be alsa libs), the program should be linked with
gcc ..... -Bstatic -lalsa-foo -lalsa-bar -Bdynamic -lpthread whatever other \
  libs that can be linked dynamically
It is strongly recommended that all libraries coming from glibc
are linked dynamically.

	Jakub