A question about building Shibboleth from source.

[Cantor, Scott]

On 12/21/12 5:34 PM, "JJ Asghar" <jj.asghar at peopleadmin.com> wrote:
>
>Ah sorry about that.  We are running Ubuntu 10.04, with the standard
>"build-essential" group.  I am able to get the ./configure to pass, nay
>clear, but as soon as I try to do a make this error happens.

Being an unsupported platform, that opens up other possibilities, like
"doesn't build there" but that's unlikely.

>I guess my first followup, if this is a dependency issue, shouldn't the
>./configure catch it? I did see some "XMLTooling" was too old and followed
>[1] who said how to get past it, but it's the newest released version [2]!

Umm, that's it catching it for you. You have an old version in the way,
perhaps in /usr/include, which is probably what's leading to the compile
failure later. Also, [2] is not xmltooling, that's xml-security-c, which
is a totally different library that the code here also depends on, but
it's not the cause of the failure in your build.

I don't know what all that advice in [1] is about (I have a theory or
two), but it's nuts. You would be intentionally breaking the configure
script to get past the errors it's told you will prevent the build from
working. Can you see why that makes no sense?

If it tells you it's too old, then there is no doubt whatsoever that it
detected a set of xmltooling/opensaml headers that are too old. You can't
fix that by patching configure to not check. That's like fixing your check
engine light by cutting the wire to your dashboard.

>Maybe I should take a step back and ask, is there a soup-to-nuts build
>from source document to get 2.5.1 out there?

There's no recipe to deal with every possible machine in the world, that's
what configure is for. The basics for Linux are here:

https://wiki.shibboleth.net/confluence/display/SHIB2/NativeSPLinuxSourceBui
ld

The only thing missing there is boost, which is a new dependency, but that
should be available on your OS as a package in some form, or you're going
to have problems anyway. If it's not new enough, then I can advise.

>Also it seems that 2.4.3, which we were running, has some dependency
>issues with
>libxml-c-dev iirc; and this is forcing me to update to 2.5.1.  I'm at a
>loss here and would really appreciate some insight.

2.4.3 is now end of life, but AFAIK it builds against any recent
Santuario/xml-security-c version, including 1.7.0, as does 2.5.1. 2.5.0
had a bug that caused it to require the absolute newest, but that's fixed.

>Can you explain the "tested cleanly?" Are you saying that it works for
>other people and not me?

I'm saying it builds cleanly on any supported platform, of which Ubuntu is
not one. Since I didn't know what you were using, I had no basis to guess.
If it were a supported OS, the definitive answer would be "user error" in
the build. On an unsupported OS, I can't just say that outright with no
direct evidence.

In closing, as a general rule, you should be deeply suspicious of
anybody's documentation that starts out by saying "you could follow the
real docs but they don't work". They are wrong; they work. The Solaris
docs in particular, which is what that document is actually talking about,
definitely work, because I spent time documenting all the new steps.

-- Scott