Yousef Ourabi

Users accustomed to 32bit Ubuntu systems are used to the seamless “apt-get install trac python-clearsilver” for installing their favorite wiki/defect tracker / source code browser — however the clearsilver component is broken on 64bit systems — and has been for several months. Thus when you browse to your trac setup you get a python stack-trace with some funkiness about clearsilver not being installed. The error looks something like this:

TracError: ClearSilver not installed (/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/neo_cgi.so: undefined symbol: Py_InitModule4)

Rant

I’m going to outline the steps I found to fix the problem, but first I’m going to rail at Canonical / Ubuntu for a minute. This new issue isn’t the first bug affecting 64 bit systems that Ubuntu took *Months* an eternity in the software industry to fix. The last time it was with the flash plugin in their repositories see “Firefox flash plugin broken on 64bit systems“. These issues both came after many of us read at the frustration members of the community were experiencing with the Ubuntu bug reporting and tracking community, aka “Why I’ve stopped reporting bugs to Ubuntu“. Ubuntu is an OK distribution. I use it. However it’s not the savior of the Desktop Linux movement it claims to be. It’s not easy enough for non-technical users to install (neither is Windows for that matter). It still takes months to fix bugs on mainstream architectures.

Fix

Follow these steps to download the latest clearsilver, compile it from source, install it, but also copy one of the generated shared objects over the existing Ubuntu one.

Note: The original calls for installing build-dep, which no longer exists so I replaced it with build-essential

$ sudo apt-get build-essential python-clearsilver
$ sudo apt-get install python-dev

Download the 0.10.4 version (as it contains fixes for python2.5)
$ wget http://www.clearsilver.net/downloads/clearsilver-0.10.4.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf clearsilver-0.10.4.tar.gz

Edit the configure files as listed by Antonio Censi above

Build the new version
$ cd clearsilver-0.10.4
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Copy the new shared object over the packaged version
$ sudo cp -bi python/neo_cgi.so /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/neo_cgi.so

Resources:
Official trac wiki page — contains cookbook version of fix: http://trac.edgewall.org/wiki/TracOnUbuntu

Ubuntu bug report page: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/clearsilver/+bug/86685

Specific comment with fix-cookbook, this is the orignal that was propagated over the inter-tubes:

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/clearsilver/+bug/86685/comments/14

Ubuntu Wall of Shame

1. Apache on Ubuntu leaves a legacy (init.d broken)
2. trac on 64bit Gusty Broken
3. Flash on 64bit Ubuntu broken

Filed under: Linux