[syslog-ng] pdbtool patternize update and my syslog-ng 3.2 branch

[Matthew Hall]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 01:20:23PM +0200, Balazs Scheidler wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-10-01 at 11:38 -0700, Matthew Hall wrote:
> > Further investigation reveals that the syslog-ng daemon and 
> > libsyslog-ng.so appear to be linking only against libc and its friends. 
> > However pdbtool's linking against a truckload of external libraries as 
> > shown before. It seems that the link logic is not consistent across 
> > different binaries.
> 
> pdbtool immediately links against the libdbparser plugin, as it uses
> some symbols in addition to the standard syslog-ng plugin interface.
> Also pdbtool depends on libssl because it uses the random generator to
> generate uuids.

I suspected something like this was the case.

> Also, syslog-ng starts early in the boot process and it was meant to be
> loaded without libssl for instance. With pdbtool only used when the
> system is up and running no such effort was made.

Yes, this makes sense, unless you are trying to run pdbtool on a distro 
on which it cannot be compiled such as RHEL 4/5.

> But anyway the easiest way to distribute syslog-ng binaries between
> different boxes is to do something similar to what we do, e.g. compile
> everything into the same prefix and copy the whole structure.

Makes sense. If I can figure out how to get mixed linking to work for 
other code besides the daemon itself. Otherwise it will not move over 
due to version conflicts in the other libs like libevent, libssl, etc. 
etc. etc.

> One thing caught my attention, you couldn't compile it on RHEL4/5? Why?
> I'd love to investigate if there's a problem there.

On RHEL 4 and 5 it requires too new of a PCRE. If you install the PCRE, 
you can break the system because other things could get angry that PCRE 
was changed. But even when you try to compile PCRE that fails because 
the autotools are too old and a ton of macros you need are missing.

So I think there are some tricks to compiling it for RHEL that I am not 
doing right, hence my questions about how Balabit managed to compile the 
code because I couldn't figure it out at all.

> Bazsi

Matthew.