Description devnull 2015-01-06 18:13:15 UTC

Hi everyone,

I’ve been trying to link a program statically that calls the iconv(3) function and was confronted with it printing the rather cryptic message "Service unavailable" and immediately exiting the program. After some websearch, I found this thread on the freebsd-current mailinglist:

* https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=140017+0+archive/2013/freebsd-current/20130825.freebsd-current
* https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=177755+0+archive/2013/freebsd-current/20130825.freebsd-current
* https://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=195390+0+archive/2013/freebsd-current/20130825.freebsd-current

It appears nothing has happened since that thread, so I add it to the tracker now so it won’t get forgotten and because I just experienced that issue as well.

Here’s the minimal example program from that ML thread to reproduce the crash:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
int main(void)
{
        iconv_t ic = iconv_open("UTF-8", "ISO-8859-1");
        if (ic == (iconv_t)-1)
                err(1, "iconv_open failed");
        iconv_close(ic);
        return 0;
}
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Save in `foo.c` and compile like this:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
$ cc -static foo.c -o foo
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Then run:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
$ ./foo
foo: iconv_open failed: Invalid argument
Service unavailable
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I can confirm this behaviour stil exists in FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE. The above example program still "works" (i.e. fails and demonstrates the problem).

Expected behaviour is to print a useful and understandable error message if it really isn’t possible to get iconv() to work in a statically linked program.

Greetings,
Marvin