Updates to installed program lists

[chris@…]

I've attached a patch that contains a number of updates to the list of installed programs/libs for several packages. As usual, I don't really know what most of these programs do so I generally just copied from manpages. There are also a few specific things I want to point out:

1. I have no idea what cpanp-run-perl is for. I've tried searching, but the most info I can find is that it is some kind of wrapper script. Maybe someone who knows Perl can look at it and figure it out...

2. Automake installs a couple of hardlinks to the aclocal and automake scripts, that have the version number appended to their names. Except, unlike what the book currently says, it's not the whole version - it leaves off the last part (the .2), so there's really aclocal-1.10 and automake-1.10. In CLFS we added a "version2" entity to simplify this a bit - also did the same for Vim, Tcl, and Readline...

<!ENTITY readline-version2 "6"> <!ENTITY readline-version "&readline-version2;.0"> <!ENTITY tcl-version2 "8.5"> <!ENTITY tcl-version "&tcl-version2;.6">

...so commands like the symlink for tclsh, or creating symlinks to Readline's shared libs, would use &packagename-version2; - that makes fewer things that need to be updated manually.

3. Glibc installs libc_nonshared.a and libpthread_nonshared.a, and GCC has libssp_nonshared.a. I've been trying to find some kind of info on what these are (since "nonshared.a" sounds redundant) but all I could find was ​this old LFS mailing list message.

4. I don't have descriptions for GCC's "libgcov.a" or E2fsprogs' "e2initrd_helper". I would assume libgcov is some library used by the gcov program, but I can't find any info on it. e2initrd_helper is in /usr/lib, but it appears to be a program rather than a library, though I can't find any docs on it either, and trying to run it doesn't seem to provide any clues as to its purpose. My guess is that it's some program that's supposed to be used internally by one of E2fsprogs' other programs, not run directly by a user, in which case it should probably be in /usr/lib/e2fsprogs.

[chris@…]

Updates to program/library lists

[Bryan Kadzban]

On 1 -- cpanp-run-perl is definitely a wrapper script. I have no idea what it's supposed to wrap, though the perldelta page ("perldoc perldelta" ;-) ) says it's a "helper for CPANPLUS operation", and isn't intended for direct use.

On 4 -- libgcov.a is (according to libgcov.c) "routines required for instrumenting a program". No idea where the archive is used, and that description is mostly useless.

From the source of e2initrd_helper, it looks like its sole purpose in life is to print the FS type (ext2 / ext3 / ext4) of a given filesystem from /etc/fstab, given either a device name (/dev/sdXY) or label (LABEL=xxxx or UUID=yyyy). This output requires the -r option; without that option, the only thing that it seems to do is indicate whether it was able to find an FS using the argument (using its exit status to do that).

[dnicholson@…]

Replying to bryan@…:

On 4 -- libgcov.a is (according to libgcov.c) "routines required for instrumenting a program". No idea where the archive is used, and that description is mostly useless.

It's used by gcc for --coverage, -fprofile-generate and/or -fprofile-arcs. Take a look at the gcc specs for *link_command.

[Bryan Kadzban]

Replying to dnicholson@…:

Take a look at the gcc specs for *link_command.

Ah, I see: it gets linked into programs when you tell gcc to enable profiling, and is presumably the code that actually *does* the profiling you've requested. Makes perfect sense now. Thanks! :-)

[Matthew Burgess]

Chris, thanks very much for your patch. I applied it in r8870.