Intallation fails on Ubuntu

[yutaro-sakamoto]

A sample program INSERTTBL in sample/ directory does not work on Ubuntu.

$ ocesql INSERTTBL.cbl INSERTTBL.cob
$ cobc -m -locesql INSERTTBL.cob
$ cobcrun INSERTTBL
*** INSERTTBL STARTED ***
libcob: Cannot find module 'OCESQLConnect'

In order to execute INSERTTBL, it is necessary to set the environment variable LD_PRELOAD to /usr/local/lib/libocesql.so

$ ocesql INSERTTBL.cbl INSERTTBL.cob
$ cobc -m -locesql INSERTTBL.cob
$ LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libocesql.so cobcrun INSERTTBL

This problem is probably caused by an incorrect configuration of libocesql.so The following Dockerfile describes the full installation process on Ubuntu.

FROM ubuntu:20.04

ENV DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive

RUN apt-get update

RUN apt-get install -y build-essential libncurses5 libncurses5-dev libgmp-dev bison flex gettext automake autoconf git
RUN apt-get install -y libpq-dev

RUN cd /root && git clone https://github.com/opensourcecobol/opensource-cobol.git

RUN cd /root/opensource-cobol/vbisam &&\
    ./configure --prefix=/usr/ &&\
    make &&\
    make install &&\
    cd ../ &&\
    ./configure --prefix=/usr/ --with-vbisam &&\
    make &&\
    make install

ADD https://github.com/opensourcecobol/Open-COBOL-ESQL/archive/refs/tags/v1.2.tar.gz /root/Open-COBOL-ESQL-1.2.tar.gz
RUN cd /root &&\
    tar zxvf Open-COBOL-ESQL-1.2.tar.gz &&\
    cd Open-COBOL-ESQL-1.2 &&\
    ./configure &&\
    C_INCLUDE_PATH=/usr/include/postgresql/ make &&\
    make install

RUN cd /root/Open-COBOL-ESQL-1.2/sample &&\
    cp ../copy/* . &&\
    ocesql INSERTTBL.cbl INSERTTBL.cob &&\
    cobc -m -locesql INSERTTBL.cob  &&\
    LD_PRELOAD=/usr/local/lib/libocesql.so cobcrun INSERTTBL

ENTRYPOINT ["/bin/bash"]

[yutaro-sakamoto]

It seems difficult to solve this issue. I added note to README.

[GitMensch]

LD_PRELOAD is a quite bad hack, with that README note people will likely export it which commonly breaks something and tells the dynamic link loader to do this for every executable. The issue is that libcob does not find the module, very likely because the actual CALL is a dynamic one and/or the dynamic linker removed the "unused" library.

To work around this each of the following solutions should work;

• let ocesql generate the CALLs as CALL STATIC 'OCESQLConnect' ... (cobc will directly insert the library call, the dynamic linker will resolve that from libocesql
• let cobc generate all calls to literals as static itself - same effect cobc -static -m ...
• tell the linker to not drop the "unused" library, by passing -Wl,--no-as-needed (depending on the cobc used that can be passed via -Q or by overriding cobc's linker call via environment variables)

... or: use COB_PRE_LOAD to load the library, or relink libcob/cobcrun to have the library linked with the -Wl,--no-as-needed option.

[yutaro-sakamoto]

I removed the description of LD_PRELOAD in README and created a new wiki page for Ubuntu users. I will fix this issue in the future.