#it just took me forever to _find_

[ellcrys]

ok I just want to take a moment to rant bc the bug fix I’d been chasing down since monday that I finally just resolved was resolved with. get this. A VERSION UPDATE. A LIBRARY VERSION UPDATE. *muffled screaming into the endless void*

so what was happening. was that the jblas library I was using for handling complex matrices in my java program was throwing a fucking hissy fit when I deployed it via openshift in a dockerized container. In some ways, I understand why it would throw a fit because docker containers only come with the barest minimum of software installed and you mostly have to do all the installing of what your program needs by yourself. so ok. no biggie. my program runs locally but doesn’t run in docker: this makes sense. the docker container is probably just missing the libgfortran3 library that was likely preinstalled on my local machine. which means I’ll just update the dockerfile (which tells docker how to build the docker image/container) with instructions on how to install libgfortran3. problem solved. right? WRONG.

lo and behold, the bane of my existence for the past 3 days. this was the error that made me realize I needed to manually install libgfortran3, so I was pretty confident installing the missing library would fix my issue. WELL. turns out. it in fact didn’t. so now I’m chasing down why.

some forums suggested specifying the tmp directory as a jvm option or making sure the libgfortran library is on the LD_LIBRARY_PATH but basically nothing I tried was working so now I’m sitting here thinking: it probably really is just the libgfortran version. I think I legitimately need version 3 and not versions 4 or 5. because that’s what 90% of the solutions I was seeing was suggesting.

BUT! fuck me I guess because the docker image OS is RHEL which means I have to use the yum repo to install software (I mean I guess I could have installed it with the legit no kidding .rpm package but that’s a whole nother saga I didn’t want to have to go down), and the yum repo had already expired libgfortran version 3. :/ It only had versions 4 and 5, and I was like, well that doesn’t help me!

anyways so now I’m talking with IT trying to get their help to find a version of libgfortran3 I can install when. I FIND THIS ELUSIVE LINK. and at the very very bottom is THIS LINK.

Turns out. 1.2.4 is in fact not the latest version of jblas according to the github project page (on the jblas website it claims that 1.2.4 is the current verison ugh). And according to the issue opened at the link above, version 1.2.5 should fix the libgfortran3 issue.

and I think it did?! because when I updated the library version in my project and redeployed it, the app was able to run without crashing on the libgfortran3 error.

sometimes the bug fix is as easy as updating a fucking version number. but it takes you 3 days to realize that’s the fix. or at least a fix. I was mentally preparing myself to go down the .rpm route but boy am I glad I don’t have to now.

anyways tl;dr: WEBSITES ARE STUPID AND LIKELY OUTDATED AND YOU SHOULD ALWAYS CHECK THE SOURCE CODE PAGE FOR THE LATEST MOST UP TO DATE INFORMATION.