Re: [PATCH v5 1/1] build: add libarchive to external deps

[Bruce Richardson <bruce.richardson@intel.com>]

On Mon, Nov 06, 2023 at 05:03:10PM +0100, David Marchand wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 6, 2023 at 5:12 AM Srikanth Yalavarthi
> <syalavarthi@marvell.com> wrote:
> >
> > In order to avoid linking with Libs.private, libarchive is not added to
> > ext_deps during the meson setup stage.
> >
> > Since libarchive is not added to ext_deps, cross-compilation or native
> > compilation with libarchive installed in non-standard location fails
> > with errors related to "cannot find -larchive" or "archive.h: No such
> > file or directory". In order to fix the build failures, user is
> > required to define the 'c_args' and 'c_link_args' with '-I<includedir>'
> > and '-L<libdir>'.
> >
> > This patch adds libarchive to ext_deps and further would not require
> > setting c_args and c_link_args externally.
> >
> > Fixes: 40edb9c0d36b ("eal: handle compressed firmware") Cc:
> > stable@dpdk.org
> >
> > Signed-off-by: Srikanth Yalavarthi <syalavarthi@marvell.com>
> 
> This breaks static compilation of applications.  This can be reproduced
> with test-meson-builds.sh and in GHA (which was not linking examples
> statically, I added a patch in my github repo):
> https://github.com/david-marchand/dpdk/actions/runs/6772879600/job/18406442129#step:19:19572
> 
The libarchive-dev Ubuntu package does not install all its needed
dependencies for static linking. The errors can be resolved by manually
installing the 3 missing -dev packages.

It's less than ideal, but to my mind, DPDK is behaving correctly with this
fix - it is marking that it requires libarchive as a dependency. The fact
that the libarchive.pc file lists static libraries that aren't installed is
outside of our control. The previous implementation hacked around this by
just passing -larchive in all cases, rather than using pkg-config
information. This then caused other issues that the patch submitter hit.

/Bruce