Lacking Natural Simplicity

Recent Reading

• Goddess of the Ice Realm, by David Drake; Tor, 2003. Adequate fantasy; the setting is mildly interesting, though.

• Jupiter Myth, by Lindsey Davis; Mysterious Press, 2003. Another competent Marcus Didius Falco mystery. Falco, Helena, and entourage are still in Britian.

OCaml and a Rare FreeBSD binary incompatibility

In a rare fit of binary incompatibility between versions of FreeBSD, all my OCaml 3.07p2 programs that used the Unix library broke when I upgraded to 5.2 because gethostbyaddr_r disappeared:

$ increment
Fatal error: cannot load shared library dllunix
Reason: /sw/versions/ocaml/3.07/lib/ocaml/stublibs/dllunix.so: Undefined symbol "gethostbyaddr_r"

See this e-mail for more information.

Reconfiguring and re-installing ocaml seems to have fixed the problem, but once that was done I had to rebuild (almost) all my ocaml programs and unison, the file synchronization program that I use.

This is notable mainly because of how rarely this sort of thing happens to either FreeBSD or OCaml.

Looks like some other things have broken, too: gimp, for one.

I resolved all this by upgrading my ports using portupgrade.