[Pan-users] Re: make error - undefined reference to iconv

[Duncan]

"arnuld uttre" <address@hidden>
posted address@hidden,
excerpted below, on  Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:44:03 +0530:

> I am trying to compile latest stable pan but getting make error with
> libiconv. Since my system CentOS 4.4 does not have any libiconv RPM, I
> have to compile libiconv myself from sources:
> http://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/libiconv/libiconv-1.12.tar.gz
> 
> then I put that in /usr/locaal and ran ldconfig. /usr/local/lib is in my
> LD_LIBRARY_PATH and /usr/local/bin is in PATH.  I have included here all
> the information you will need . Can I solve this make error:
> 
> 
> address@hidden pan-0.14.2]

First, despite it's being latest "stable", 0.14.x is no longer officially 
supported.  That means you're welcome to run it, and we (here on this 
list) do try to help, but there will be no further official updates of 
that code, and as the code is several years old now, it's going to be 
getting increasingly stale and will be increasingly difficult to get to 
compile against modern libraries using a modern gcc, etc.

The recommendation is therefore to try the latest pan, 0.133.  0.90 was a 
rewrite into C++ (the 0.14.x and earlier series was C), and new-pan 
scales far better on large (> a million articles) groups (these are 
usually binary groups on good servers), and has automatic multi-server 
capacities.  Thus, if you do binaries or multiple servers, new-pan is 
likely to be a better choice anyway.  That said, for smaller groups (< 
100K articles), particularly if you don't subscribe to the same group on 
multiple servers, old-pan can be better in some ways.  Its rules feature 
allows auto-download, auto-mark-read and auto-delete based on scores, for 
instance, something that's not yet possible with new-pan as Charles 
decided rules were too complicated for the user (the were rather 
complicated, we got lots of questions on them) but unfortunately, hasn't 
replaced them with anything else in new-pan, tho there's an idea what it 
should look like, it's just writing the code...  Anyway, whether you wish 
to continue trying the old is of course up to you, but you can expect to 
have issues with it, and for those issues to get worse as time goes on 
and the code gets more and more stale in comparison to modern systems.

As for the iconv issue, I was all set to suggest pointing configure at 
/usr/local, but then saw you already were.  Maybe you'll just try the 
newer code and won't have to worry about it.  Otherwise, what did 
configure say about iconv (if anything)?  Did it detect it then?  It may 
be a mismatch between glib versions, older ones using libiconv and newer 
ones not, or similar, as well.  I know there were some patches in 0.133 
so it could work with more modern glib and gcc, among other things.  
0.14.x won't have gotten those patches...  Of course, I really don't know 
how old Centos 4.4 is, either.  If it's >4 years old, old-pan should fit 
right in.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman