zomo technology

FreeBSD, gettext, libintl and bash

Monday, 10. 25. 2010  –  Category: sw

Login surprise!

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FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-p4 (GENERIC) #0: Mon Jul 12 20:22:27 UTC 2010

/libexec/ld-elf.so.1: Shared object "libintl.so.8" not found, required by "bash"
$

What’s happened here is that gettext (which provides libintl.so) has been upgraded without its dependencies noticing (read: I messed up some package maintenance). These dependencies are linked against a specific version of this library that’s now gone. One of these dependencies is bash, my preferred shell.

Having your shell asplode like that is ungood. If bash has been set as my default shell then I wouldn’t be able to log in at all! This is a risk of relying on software that isn’t part of FreeBSD’s core to absolutely always work across system maintenance. bash is a third-party port, and it’s prudent to anticipate package management fail ((because all package management sucks at some point, yes?)).

To side-step this risk I tend to set my shell to something that is native to a FreeBSD release (plain ole’ /bin/sh) and adding the following in my .profile, to test if bash is indeed working before running it:

/usr/local/bin/bash -c true && exec /usr/local/bin/bash

And to fix all the other ports that are now broken:

$ sudo portmaster -r -R devel/gettext