Compiling tor on master (2bfb76b9) breaks on Android

Our nightly Android builds are busted:

  AR       libtor.a
clang: error: no such file or directory:
'/var/tmp/dist/libevent/lib/.libs/libevent.a'

I suspect that's due to @dgoulet's c618c4f2. I am not sure whether we are supposed to adapt things in Tor Browser land instead of whether the change is an actual tor issue. If the former, please move the ticket to our tor-browser-build repo.

Ah damn... so I'm guessing in the dist tarball of libevent, the .a is in the top directory instead of .libs/ for the git autotool build.... sigh...

Ok so we need to add that path in our configure.ac

assigned to @dgoulet

changed milestone to %Tor: 0.4.5.x-stable

David Goulet:

David Goulet commented:

Ah damn... so I'm guessing in the dist tarball of libevent, the .a is in the top directory instead of .libs/ for the git autotool build.... sigh...

libevent/lib/
libevent/lib/libevent.a
libevent/lib/libevent.la
libevent/lib/libevent_core.a
libevent/lib/libevent_core.la
libevent/lib/libevent_extra.a
libevent/lib/libevent_extra.la
libevent/lib/libevent_pthreads.a
libevent/lib/libevent_pthreads.la

marked tpo/applications/tor-browser-build#40179 (closed) as a duplicate of this issue

I am not sure whether we are supposed to adapt things in Tor Browser land instead of whether the change is an actual tor issue

@dgoulet Is this an intentional breaking change? We can modify the Tor Browser build config if this is the new, expected, location, but we won't be sad if tor supports both locations for libevent, too.

Not at all.

It is simply the difference between the dist tarball and the git repository. In other words, autotool puts the .a in different places depending on those.

Woa wait... I was mistaken. The dist tarball does use .libs/libevent.a ... so can I ask what are you using for libevent here? I don't even see a lib/ in the git repo or the tarball?

Okay, we build libevent from the source git tag (autogen.sh, configure, make, and make install) so that it ends up with the usual directory structure where we set --prefix to the libevent dir (= the root dir) and have bin, include, and lib directories there. Then we zip the result up and use it in the tor build.

There we extract the libevent artifact and point libeventdir to the root of it. When compiling tor we pass --with-libevent-dir="$libeventdir". That's it (oh, and we compile libevent (among other flags) with --enable-static-libevent, in case that needs extra-mentioning).

Ok! So then I think we can also look in $libeventdir/libevent.a as well so both are supported to use the git/tarball or installed library. I'll come up with a fix.

Basically, because the git repository has no lib/ or that the libevent.a is not put in the root of the repo, we can't use --with-libevent-dir=/path/to/git/root.

It works in your setup because you have a lib/ so unless we change the configure.ac to be clever and try both locations (as in the .libs/ as well), we are stuck.

I will revert the fix and put it back to look for libevent.a directly so your setup works and for now we'll ask people to use a "make install" version of libevent to build properly or symlink the libevent.a...

mentioned in merge request !238 (merged)

closed with commit 15b0d30a