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Well Openbsd 4.2 has been out for about two months now and I wanted to post this a little sooner but with all the holidays I havent had a chance.

If you’ve upgraded to 4.2 then you have probably ran into the libexpat dependency issue like the rest of us. For those of you who have not upgraded yet, I hope you would read the Upgrade guide as one would expect as this issue is described here.

If you havent read the “gotchas” section, the issue is that the libexpat library has been moved from the base set to the xbase set. Now this presents a problem for people such as myself who do not install the xbase on firewalls and routers. The main problem is that this library is a dependancy to many other packages and is acknowledged with the following statement:

This will impact a large number of users! This was an unfortunate decision whose ramifications were not recognized earlier in the process. For 4.3, libexpat will be part of base43.tgz, solving this problem.

I believe this issue has already been resolved in the -current tree but for those of us who are only running stable we cannot wait the 4 months until the next release cycle and we sure as hell are not installing the xbase set. So what are we to do. I’m sure this is completely unsupported by the OpenBSD folk but this worked fine for me.

Workaround:

Download the xbase set at ftp://ftp.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/4.2/i386/xbase42.tar.gz

Extract the xbase42.tar.gz to a temporary location, say /tmp

#mv xbase42.tar.gz /tmp
#cd /tmp
#tar -zxvf xbase42.tar.gz

There are 3 files in which you need inside the ./xbase42/usr/X11R6/lib directory.

#cd ./xbase42/usr/X11R6/lib
#ls -al libe*

-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 153436 Aug 8 23:03 libexpat.a
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 157767 Aug 8 23:03 libexpat.so.8.0
-rw-rw-rw- 1 user group 183510 Aug 8 23:03 libexpat_pic.a

Copy these 3 files to your /usr/lib directory.

#cp libe* /usr/lib

And whala! A stupid simple solution to a really annoying issue. Now you should be able to install/upgrade your packages as you need without hitting this dependency issue. Other then this little bug the Openbsd 4.2 release has worked great for me.

Tags: bsd, bugs, dependency, libexpat, openbsd, workarounds

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 11:21 pm and is filed under bsd. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.