MakeMaker change needed to fix Apache/mod_perl coredumps

[Alan Burlison <Alan.Burlison@uk.sun.com>]

Many of you who use Apache and mod_perl will know that if you build
mod_perl with the Apache APXS mechanism it dumps core, and that this is
a so-far intractable problem that affects more than one OS (Solaris and
BSD being two of them).

I havn't got right to the root of the problem yet, but it is definitely
related to the fact that the order that .so files are loaded is
different between mod_perl built with DSO and mod_perl built with APXS.

It is important to note that this problem will affect *any* other
similar application where the perl libperl.so is referenced by something
that is in turn dlopen'd by the main program.

There are two current workarounds.  The first is to use LD_PRELOAD to
load in the perl libperl.so at startup.  This is obviously a gross hack.

The second is to modify MakeMaker so that all the .so files it produces
from XS code have an explicit dependency on the perl libperl.so.  This
would mean adding 
"-L <path to libperl.so> -lperl" to the linker line in the Makefiles
output by MakeMaker.

Can anyone think of any deleterious effects of doing this?  If not, I'll
get folks on the mod_perl list to check that the fix actually works on
all the affected systems and then submit an official patch to p5p.

Thanks,

Alan Burlison

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Follow-Ups from:

Hugo <hv@crypt.compulink.co.uk>
Nick Ing-Simmons <nick@ing-simmons.net>

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