[collectd] 4.2.1 on Solaris 10

[Florian Forster]

Hi Christophe,

thanks again for your bugreports :)

That those plugins aren't disabled by default kind of sucks. Apparently
Solaris is not Solaris, though: I compile collectd on a Solaris box from
time to time (yes, it's Solaris 10 there, too) and there the apcups
plugin (with that _FILE_OFFSET_BITS problem) and the swap plugin worked
there without a problem. It'd be interesting what the differences are: I
used the Sun CC and it was a SPARC machine. Is there more that sets
Solaris installations apart?

Solaris doesn't usually define the standard getpwnam_r for whatever
reason. Probably an autoconf check and/or some C magic would be
appropriate. For now you can force Solaris to define a standard
compliant version of getpwnam_r with the `_POSIX_PTHREAD_SEMANTICS'
or by defining `_POSIX_C_SOURCE' greater than or equal to 199506.

On Wed, Dec 05, 2007 at 03:36:33PM -0500, Christophe Kalt wrote:
> But other things compile just fine, so saying that it's an autoconf
> bug may be a bit premature.

collectd itself doesn't define `_FILE_OFFSET_BITS' anywhere and there's
that LFS macro that does some magic. The autotools would be the first
place where I'd think the problem comes from, too..

> | D'oh... a lot of those *_r functions seem to be quite system-dependent.

No, actually they're in one of the POSIX versions. The (GNU) manpage of
getgrnam_r on my workstation talks about POSIX.1-2001, but the define
(see above) seems to refer to an earlier version..

> Easy, it calls swapctl(2); but unlike collectd, swap(1M) does not also
> need LFS support.

Probably some struct has a member of type off_t which is redefined by
those autoconf macros or something. I'm pretty sure that this can be
fixed by some more magic in the swap plugin.. I'll see what I can find
out..

> My quick read of the collectd 4 docs seem to indicate the latter can
> easily be achieved with the exec and unixsock plugins, but what i was
> saying is that it'd be nicer if collectd did that transparently.

I see the popularity of the exec plugin with mixed feelings: Sure it's
nice that everyone can hack some script in whatever language he feels
like today, but collectd's goal is not rapid development but well
written and maintainted functionality. So I'd rather spend two days
looking at how to make the swap plugin work with the LFS stuff (or how
to tell autoconf that you system doesn't need it at all) then take ten
minutes to write that simple wrapper around `swap -s'.

So, the bottom line is: Thank you very much for your bugreports, I'll do
my best to resolve the problems. The `getgrnam_r' functions (and
friends) will be ``blessed'' with an own autoconf check in the next
minor version or the next patch release, I'm not sure yet. The problems
in the apcups and swap plugins both seem to be LFS related. I'll have to
see if that behavior is expected and how it can be fixed or worked
around. My suspicion is that LFS is activated although it's not needed
under Solaris.

Regards,
-octo
-- 
Florian octo Forster
Hacker in training
GnuPG: 0x91523C3D
http://verplant.org/
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