Bug 3520

Summary:	autoreconf is overkill for a fresh checkout
Product:	Portable OpenSSH	Reporter:	Clarence "Sparr" Risher <sparr0>
Component:	Build system	Assignee:	Assigned to nobody <unassigned-bugs>
Status:	CLOSED WORKSFORME
Severity:	trivial	CC:	dtucker, sam
Priority:	P5
Version:	9.1p1
Hardware:	All
OS:	All

Description Clarence "Sparr" Risher 2023-01-13 13:46:22 AEDT

This may not be worth worrying about, but it may also be useful to add as a note in INSTALL. After a fresh git checkout, I am able to compile after `aclocal && autoconf`, which is a subset of what `autoreconf` does and requires fewer additional tools to be available.

Comment 1 Clarence "Sparr" Risher 2023-01-13 13:47:55 AEDT

I may have spoken too soon. I did some other processes while troubleshooting another problem and may have manually run one or more of the other autoreconf steps outside of my efforts here.

Comment 2 Darren Tucker 2023-01-13 14:35:22 AEDT

(In reply to Clarence "Sparr" Risher from comment #0)
> This may not be worth worrying about, but it may also be useful to
> add as a note in INSTALL. After a fresh git checkout, I am able to
> compile after `aclocal && autoconf`, which is a subset of what
> `autoreconf` does and requires fewer additional tools to be
> available.

That's not sufficient, you also need "autoheader":

$ git clone https://github.com/openssh/openssh-portable && cd openssh-portable && aclocal && autoconf && ./configure
[...]
config.status: error: cannot find input file: `config.h.in'

$ autoheader && ./configure && make
[...]
$ ./ssh -V
OpenSSH_9.1p1, OpenSSL 3.0.5 5 Jul 2022

but given that this only impacts people building the development versions, and that it's possible to do the autoconf prep on a machine other than the build target (that's what our VM-based tests do since it keeps the prereqs on the VMs to a minimum) I'd rather specify the thing that guaranteed to do all of the needful even if that means you may have to install another package or two on the development machine.

Comment 3 Sam James 2023-01-13 22:59:03 AEDT

This seems like premature optimisation anyway. It also depends on future changes to the build system and then someone may well forget to update INSTALL.

Comment 4 Darren Tucker 2023-01-13 23:48:55 AEDT

(In reply to Sam James from comment #3)
> This seems like premature optimisation anyway. It also depends on
> future changes to the build system and then someone may well forget
> to update INSTALL.

Agreed, I'm happy with the existing instructions.

Clarence: thanks  for the report, but we don't plan on changing this.

Comment 5 Damien Miller 2023-03-17 13:42:43 AEDT

OpenSSH 9.3 has been released. Close resolved bugs