Check for libc version?

[ivan@…]

Debian stable (Etch) carries version 2.3.6 of GNU libc. It is unable to use pyinotify 0.8:

>>> import pyinotify
INFO: Maybe it could speed-up a little bit if you had psyco installed (not required).
>>> wm = pyinotify.WatchManager()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
  File "pyinotify.py", line 1259, in __init__
    self._fd = LIBC.inotify_init() # inotify's init, file descriptor
  File "ctypes/__init__.py", line 325, in __getattr__
  File "ctypes/__init__.py", line 330, in __getitem__
AttributeError: python2.5: undefined symbol: inotify_init

The functions are actually not defined there

$ strings /lib/libc-2.3.6.so | grep inotify
(nothing)

though the kernel has inotify support:

$ uname -r
2.6.18-6-powerpc
$ grep inotify_init /boot/System.map-2.6.18-6-powerpc
c00a8b7c T inotify_init
c00a8d04 T inotify_init_watch
c00a9470 T sys_inotify_init
...

The whole thing runs OK under an Ubuntu release using a newer version of libc:

$ strings /lib/libc-2.6.1.so | grep inotify
inotify_add_watch
inotify_init
inotify_rm_watch

So, what's the minimum version of libc required? Is there any chance of circumventing this problem? If not, it'd be nice to have the required version documented.

[seb]

You're right it should be documented and an explicit requirement should be fixed, though I don't know myself the precise version of glibc which started to support inotify.

[seb]

glibc 2.4 ??

[dato]

Yes, the Debian and Ubuntu packages of glibc say that it was 2.4 that introduced the inotify_* functions. (This information is contained in the DEBIAN/symbols file of libc6 >= 2.8 both in Debian and Ubuntu.)

HTH,

[seb]

http://git.dbzteam.org/?p=pyinotify.git;a=commit;h=0c76263e0c9fd8dce89e769c0b138bc71f78cecc