Cannot build on Debian 12

[Zsar]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Installed dependencies listed here.
2. called ./configure as instructed here.

Errors, config.h not emitted:

./configure: line 4974: AC_HEADER_MAJOR_FIXED: command not found
./configure: line 9030: TYPE_SOCKLEN_T: command not found
./configure: line 9538: syntax error near unexpected token `struct'
./configure: line 9538: `AC_HAVE_TYPE(struct addrinfo, #include <netdb.h>)'

3. Next step fails predictably:

$ make
make: *** No targets specified and no makefile found.  Stop.

Using autoconf/stable,stable,now 2.71-3 all on Debian 12.8.

Full log attached.

[Zsar]

FWIW: ./configure succeeds using

• autoconf/oldoldstable,oldoldstable,now 2.69-11 all on Debian 10.13
• autoconf/oldstable,oldstable,now 2.69-14 all on Debian 11.9

Installing autoconf2.69/stable,stable,now 2.69-3.1 all in addition to the base package on Debian 12 apparently makes it work there.

[Zsar]

<rant>In my experience "if a project uses autoconf, building from source is broken" has been a 100% experience for me over the last ~five years on a wide variety of Linux environments, covering different versions of Debian, Ubuntu, MSYS2, Arch.

Invariably some AC_<something> error is involved and invariably it seems that trying some other minor version of autoconf is the - or at least the biggest part of the - solution. That program just seems to be the embodiment of brittleness. </rant>

[charmitro]

Can't read the logs atm, but give sudo apt build-dep rsync a try and retry building. Maybe you'll get everything you want from there.

[sudhackar]

Looks like on debian bookworm even after installing whats mentioned on the docs here - some packages are still missing. As charmitro suggested

# sudo apt build-dep rsync
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree... Done
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  autopoint bsdextrautils build-essential bzip2 debhelper dh-autoreconf dh-strip-nondeterminism dpkg-dev dwz file gettext gettext-base groff-base
  intltool-debian libarchive-zip-perl libdebhelper-perl libdpkg-perl libelf1 libfile-stripnondeterminism-perl libicu72 libmagic-mgc libmagic1
  libpipeline1 libpopt-dev libpopt0 libsub-override-perl libtool libuchardet0 libxml2 make man-db po-debconf sensible-utils xz-utils zlib1g-dev
0 upgraded, 35 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 21.1 MB of archives.
After this operation, 76.2 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

are still needed You might need to add deb-src to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/debian.sources

Here are my console logs from a bookworm debian docker container where I was able to build

logs.txt

[sudhackar]

I tried with a clean bookworm container without the build-dep step and it succeeded as well. Maybe its a config issue for you - the default build works fine

logs-no-build-deps.txt

[Zsar]

Mmh. I seem to be pretty alone with this issue and now I have shelved my Debian 12 system, so I cannot even investigate further - going to just close this issue.

If anyone in the future has the same problem on a comparable system (e.g. Debian 12+ or one of the Debian forks), feel free to re-open.