nmap: help wanted?

[Lukas Schwaighofer]

Hi,

On Thu, 07 Sep 2017 13:35:50 +0200
Hilko Bengen <bengen at debian.org> wrote:
> Just a note: I think that Depends: nmap-common (= ${source:Version})
> may be broken by binNMUs (but I'm not sure about that).

I had read the wiki page about binNMUs [1] according to which this usage
is correct.  Thanks Raphaël for confirming.

> What exactly prevented autoreconf from working?

Currently, autoreconfing is effectively disabled because of the
following statement in debian/rules (only running autoconf does not do
all the processing we want, `autoreconf -fi` is required):

override_dh_autoreconf:
	dh_autoreconf autoconf

If I remove that from d/rules (and do not apply the patch), I experience
the same problem as in the original Debian bug report [2]: the
autoheader tool issues a few warnings and then exits with a non-zero
status code (even though it does not display any errors).  There was
also someone on the nmap mailing list ~10 years ago with a similar
problem [3].

From the error messages I was able to guess what autoheader was choking
on:  Statements like

    AC_DEFINE(CPP_MACRO_NAME)

only works if there is either a pervious

    AH_TEMPLATE(CPP_MACRO_NAME, ...)

or when used in the more verbose form:

    AC_DEFINE(CPP_MARCO_NAME, value, description)

After fixing all of those I was able to run `autoreconf -fi` in all
the directories which contain source that we use in Debian.  I'm still
not able to use it in all directories (so I have to use the
--no-recursive option), because of the modifications of third party
libraries done by nmap.  For example, libpcre/NMAP_MODIFICATIONS
explicitly states that Makefile.am was removed which autoremake does not
like ("error: no 'Makefile.am' found for any configure output").


As I've also indicated in my mail to nmap-dev, I don't really know why
this problem occurs (especially considering that the `configure` scripts
have been generated by the same autoconf version we currently have in
Debian).  My best guess is that Debian's version of autoheader by
default treats warnings as errors, while other installations possibly
only print the warnings without bailing out (but this is pure
speculation).

> However, I wouldn't expect ftp-master to raise a problem about the
> copyright file, so let's just upload as soon as you finalize your
> changes for any other outstanding technical issues.

I'll trust in your judgment here.  Regarding the autoreconf update, I'd
prefer to wait a few days if there is feedback to my post on nmap-dev
before committing the patch and enabling autoreconf.

Regards
Lukas

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/binNMU
[2] https://bugs.debian.org/757456
[3] http://seclists.org/nmap-dev/2008/q2/233