It fell to me to install Review Board on our Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) administrative server, to evaluate it for our online code reviews. This should have been a snap, because:

1. The server is a clean installation, administered by yours truly. I install only necessary software, and use apt-get for all of them.
2. I read installation instructions before installing software.
3. I’m smart.

I installed Review Board and hooked it up to Apache 2.2 without too much trouble. (I had a mental block on the <Alias> directive, but never mind that.)

All went well, until I got to the end of Review Board’s installation instructions. There I found:

Set Up Search
This isn’t strictly necessary (and might be hard on some platforms), but it’ll make your users love you. See SettingUpSearch for details.

I want my team to love me. So, I took the bait.

ReviewBoard search uses PyLucene. There’s no PyLucene package for Hardy. This should have told me something. But it had build instructions, so it should be no big deal. Right? I plunged ahead.

apt-get install gcc g++ sun-java6-jdk ant worked fine. Looking good.

I went for the final install, and it blew up.

root:~/PyLucene-2.4.0-2/jcc# python setup.py build
running build
running build_py
copying jcc/config.py -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.5/jcc
copying jcc/classes/org/osafoundation/jcc/PythonVM.class -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.5/jcc/classes/org/osafoundation/jcc
copying jcc/classes/org/osafoundation/jcc/PythonException.class -> build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.5/jcc/classes/org/osafoundation/jcc
running build_ext
building ‘jcc’ extension
gcc -pthread -fno-strict-aliasing -DNDEBUG -g -fwrapv -O2 -Wall -Wstrict-prototypes -fPIC -D_jcc_lib -I/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/include -I/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/include/linux -I_jcc -Ijcc/sources -I/usr/include/python2.5 -c jcc/sources/jcc.cpp -o build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.5/jcc/sources/jcc.o -DPYTHON -fno-strict-aliasing -Wno-write-strings
cc1plus: warning: command line option “-Wstrict-prototypes” is valid for Ada/C/ObjC but not for C++
jcc/sources/jcc.cpp:20:17: error: jni.h: No such file or directory
In file included from jcc/sources/JObject.h:21,
                 from jcc/sources/jcc.cpp:28:
jcc/sources/JCCEnv.h:73: error: ‘jobject’ does not name a type
jcc/sources/JCCEnv.h:79: error: ‘jclass’ does not name a type
[...snip...]

Ruh roh, jni.h was nowhere to be found!

After a bit of sleuthing, here’s what the problem turned out to be. The installation instructions — which had been tested and verified to be correct, right? guess not — had me install the sun-java6-jdk package, which created /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.07 and an associated /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun symlink.

But, gee whiz, the gcc command looked for includes in /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk.

The Sun JDK and Open JDK are supposed to now be functionally identical, with the latter one just having a more friendly open-source license. So, I edited setup.py and changed the INCLUDES to be:

INCLUDES = {
[snip]
'linux2': ['/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/include', '/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/include/linux'],
[snip]

Rebuild.

Bam, crash and burn with a g++ error.

g++ -pthread -shared -Wl,-O1 -Wl,-Bsymbolic-functions build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.5/jcc/sources/jcc.o build/temp.linux-x86_64-2.5/jcc/sources/JCCEnv.o -o build/lib.linux-x86_64-2.5/libjcc.so -L/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/amd64 -ljava -L/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/amd64/server -ljvm -Wl,-rpath=/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/amd64:/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/lib/amd64/server -Wl,-S -lpython2.5
/usr/bin/ld: cannot find -ljava
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
error: command 'g++' failed with exit status 1

Ah, the pesky “openjdk” again. Turns out the link flags were also broken. I changed the LFLAGS to also point to /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun.

Rebuild.

Success! Finishing the installation required some fiddling with my sys.path, but that was trivial.