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README-Linux.md

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Building libtabula on Linux

Linux is sufficiently like Unix that the Unix README covers most of what you need to know to build and use libtabula on Linux. This file only includes the Linux-specific details.

Prerequisite: Install the libtabula Development Files

libtabula builds on top of the C API for your DBMS(es) of choice, so it needs the C API development files to build against.

Most Linux distributions package the DBMS and the C API files separately. This is because it is quite common to run the DBMS server on a different machine than is used to develop clients for that server. A single machine often doesn't need to have both packages installed.

There are about as many different ways to get DBMS development files on your system as there are major Linux distributions, multiplied by the number of DBMSes libtabula supports at the time you try it. More, actually, because there are also often direct first-party packages in addition to your distro's versions, plus possibly third-party packages. This document cannot possibly list all your options, much less tell you which option is best for you.

On Red Hat type systems with yum, this may work:

# yum install mysql-devel
# yum install sqlite-devel

On Debian/Ubuntu type systems, something more like this will do:

$ sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient18-dev
$ sudo apt-get install libsqlite3-dev

The odd MySQL version number is the ABI version of the MySQL C API library. ABI version 18 corresponds to MySQL version 5.5, the recommended stable version as of this writing.

Dealing with the Dynamic Linker

ld.so is the dynamic linker on Linux. It is a system-level program which is used to run any program that uses shared libraries (lib*.so). Its job is to find the libraries and link them to the base executable so it will run.

Because ld.so only looks in a few places for libraries on most systems, a common problem is a program that builds without error but won't run, complaining about libtabula.SOMETHING.

There are a number of ways to deal with this.

The most robust way to tell ld.so about a nonstandard library directory is to put it in /etc/ld.so.conf or in one of the files included from there. Then, run ldconfig as root to rebuild the cache file ld.so uses to find libraries in these nonstandard directories.

A cheap and sleazy alternative is to configure libtabula to install under /usr instead of /usr/local:

$ cd build
$ cmake -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr ..

This isn't recommended practice when building packages from source, because the /usr prefix is for system packages, such as those installed via your Linux distro's package manager. Nevertheless, it does work.

A cleaner alternative is to add the libtabula library directory to the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. This works like the shell's PATH variable: a colon-separated list of directories to search. This is best when the installation directory is something totally uncommon, or you don't have root permissions on the box so you can't do the next option.