Problem with lofar libraries

[nudomarinero]

In a clean Ubuntu 16.04 installation I got the following error after installing "lofar" (from Kern-3):

$ msoverview in=L136064_SAP000_SB041_uv.MS
msoverview: Version 20110407GvD
Error: Shared library lofarstman not found in CASACORE_LDPATH or (DY)LD_LIBRARY_PATH
libcasa_lofarstman.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
libcasa_lofarstman.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
liblofarstman.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
liblofarstman.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

The problem is solved installing the package "lofar-dev".

[gijzelaerr]

This is a problem with LOFAR software itself, it expects the development links for libraries installed. I don't want to add the lofar-dev dependency to it by default since the package itself is already quite big. Maybe it helps if you report it upstream (again).

[gijzelaerr]

wait let me leave this issue open and add a label, that is more useful.

[tammojan]

Raw LOFAR measurement sets do not work without the dynamically loaded shared library being installed. This is by design. If this shared library is part of lofar-dev, then apparently you need to install that.

[gijzelaerr]

they are installed, but only the real library, not all the symlinks. The symlinks are supposed to be used during development. An example:

liblofarstman0 contains /usr/lib/liblofarstman.so.0
lofar-dev contains /usr/lib/liblofarstman.so which is a symlink to the .so.0 file

this is the same for all debian packages.

The lofar package depends on for liblofarstman0 and others, so the shared library is available, msoverview is looking for the wrong path.

[gijzelaerr]

When I look at it again now I see that msoverview tries to load SO version specific libraries first, but the version mismatch.

I think this has to do with this applied patch that is needed that never reached upstream:

https://github.com/kernsuite-debian/lofar/blob/master/debian/patches/soversion

I set the version to 0, since at the moment no versioning seems to be used upstream at all. So I'm surprised msoverview tries to use version 2? I guess it is time to start to do proper SO versioning upstream.

[gijzelaerr]

@tammojan what about this one? It looks like msoverview expects an SO version set to 2? What is the reasoning?

[gijzelaerr]

@tammojan any update on this?

[tammojan]

The reason msoverview looks for version 2 is that casacore is at major version 2. The dynamic library is not searched for by msoverview itself, but from the underlying casacore tables layer. The relevant line in casacore is here. Casacore's SOVERSION is by default the project major version, see here. So 2 is a better number than 0 here.

[gijzelaerr]

ok, then I'll set this to 2. Is this never going to reach upstream?

[gijzelaerr]

meanwhile, this has been fixed in 3.1.5-1 which has been uploaded to KERN-dev and will land in KERN-5. @tammojan let me know about merging in upstream (should still happen) but for now I close this issue.

[tammojan]

I reported it even upstreamer, so it may well be merged. I'll report it here when it's merged.