[Debian-astro-maintainers] Bug#1070237: wsclean: error while loading shared libraries: libradler.so: cannot open shared object file

[André Offringa]

Hi Ole,

Thanks for looking into this. I did some analysis and found that Radler 
was in fact still build as static library in wsclean version 3.4. This 
was corrected only in:
- https://git.astron.nl/RD/radler/-/merge_requests/123
and
- https://gitlab.com/aroffringa/wsclean/-/merge_requests/591
These were merged only after releasing v3.4. My bug report was therefore 
not accurate in assuming that this was caused by a Debian setting.

To make WSClean 3.4 work, either those commits would have to be applied 
to the code base to link radler statically, or the libradler.so library 
needs to be shipped along with wsclean. The first option I have tested 
with the script provided below in a wsclean v3.4 git cloned directory, 
and that works. I guess you're not checking out the git repositories in 
the Debian build so I've also made a patch that can be applied with 
"patch -s -p1 < link-radler-statically.patch" from the wsclean v3.4 dir. 
It's attached to this mail. I hope this patch suffices for the Debian 
build, otherwise let me know if I can do something else to help.

When we release a newer wsclean version, the patch is no longer 
necessary. However, the release of wsclean v3.5 will probably take some 
time, and does have quite some changes, so a 3.4 build would be nice.

Another thing: would it be possible to run 'wsclean --version' in the 
build just to see if it succeeds? That should at least catch any linking 
issues like here. There's also a much bigger wsclean test-suite, but 
that might be a bit overkill for Debian, as it takes a considerable 
amount of time and resources to run, and getting the tests correctly 
through all debian platforms will be a bit challenging I think (not 
unlike Casacore, whose tests are actually somewhat less demanding).

Thanks for your help, Ole!

Regards,
André

# Building WSClean 3.4 with Radler as static library
<in wsclean v3.4 directory>

# Make sure submodules are present and at the right commit
# (not sure this is necessary in the Debian build)
mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. <OTHER OPTIONS>
cd ..

# Merge https://gitlab.com/aroffringa/wsclean/-/merge_requests/591
git cherry-pick 45c51219c0ea2deafb5de9edf2dddfda509f779b

# Merge https://git.astron.nl/RD/radler/-/merge_requests/123
cd external/radler
git cherry-pick 7fec4c029d62dcb664d894eae6909fa4ca92b642

cd ../../build
make -j`nproc`
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