[Buildroot] building host-e2fsprogs on RHEL5.8

[Thomas Petazzoni <thomas.petazzoni@free-electrons.com>]

Hollis,

On Tue, 28 Jul 2015 17:23:58 -0700, Hollis Blanchard wrote:
> I get two errors when building buildroot's host-e2fsprogs (1.42.13) on 
> RHEL5.8, both from e4defrag.c:
> e4defrag.c:197:2: error: #error sync_file_range not available!
> e4defrag.c:201:2: error: #error fallocate64 not available!
> 
> The latter can be patched by calling posix_fallocate64 instead. The 
> former seems to be due to a known bug 
> <https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=518581>, requiring manually 
> calling syscall().
> 
> (For the record, this is glibc 2.5 and kernel 2.6.18.)
> 
> I can work around the problem with this:
> diff --git a/package/e2fsprogs/e2fsprogs.mk b/package/e2fsprogs/e2fsprogs.mk
> index 0537521..4aeda83 100644
> --- a/package/e2fsprogs/e2fsprogs.mk
> +++ b/package/e2fsprogs/e2fsprogs.mk
> @@ -12,6 +12,9 @@ E2FSPROGS_LICENSE_FILES = COPYING lib/uuid/COPYING 
> lib/ss/mit-sipb-copyright.h l
>   E2FSPROGS_INSTALL_STAGING = YES
>   E2FSPROGS_INSTALL_STAGING_OPTS = DESTDIR=$(STAGING_DIR) install-libs
> 
> +HOST_E2FSPROGS_CONF_OPTS = \
> +       --disable-defrag
> +
>   E2FSPROGS_CONF_OPTS = \
>          $(if $(BR2_STATIC_LIBS),,--enable-elf-shlibs) \
>          $(if $(BR2_PACKAGE_E2FSPROGS_DEBUGFS),,--disable-debugfs) \
> 
> 
> Alternately, if I come up with patches to work around these two 
> problems, would buildroot carry them until upstream e2fsprogs (hopefully 
> one day) picks them up?

Thanks for the report.

To be honest, I don't think we really care about having the ext4
defragmentation tool being built as part of our host-e2fsprogs build.
So you could just as well submit a patch that does:

# the ext4 defragmentation utility doesn't build on old systems, and we
# don't need it, so disable it
HOST_E2FSPROGS_CONF_OPTS += --disable-defrag

Of course, do not hesitate to report the issue upstream. But I don't
think it's worth adding patches to fix this in Buildroot in the mean
time, just disable the tool.

Best regards,

Thomas
-- 
Thomas Petazzoni, CTO, Free Electrons
Embedded Linux, Kernel and Android engineering
http://free-electrons.com