The libarchive builds on AIX fail to build shared libraries and archive_file is broken in chef-client

[lamont-granquist]

There is no /opt/chef/embedded/lib/libarchive.so installed by the libarchive software definition on AIX.

I looked into this a little bit and in the build logs you can see the configure output where it says it is building shared libraries, but they don't show up there's only a .a and a .la file that get deployed.

For now the archive_file functional tests are turned off in chef/chef:

https://github.com/chef/chef/blob/main/spec/functional/resource/archive_file_spec.rb

https://github.com/chef/chef/blob/main/spec/unit/resource/archive_file_spec.rb

[tpowell-progress]

See chef/chef#12841 (comment) I think this is an issue with how we hook into the .a file. In libtool for libarchive-3.6.2 there is

    aix,no) # traditional AIX only
      dynamic_linker='AIX lib.a(lib.so.V)'
      # We preserve .a as extension for shared libraries through AIX4.2
      # and later when we are not doing run time linking.
      library_names_spec='$libname$release.a $libname.a'
      soname_spec='$libname$release$shared_ext$major'
      ;;

In order for the .so to be built (it's actually a symlink to .so.{version} that also exists on AIX), the library_names_spec needs the following specification

library_names_spec='$libname$release$shared_ext$major $libname$release$shared_ext$versuffix $libname$shared_ext' where the last parameter is the .so symlink