Configure is failing about tpm2-pkcs11

[williamcroberts]

@nagesh20 I think that's the AX_IS_RELEASE macro failing on you. Not really sure why. Is your autoconf-archive most recent or old?

Are you building out of the git directory? We use git describe for our version number.

[nagesh20]

@williamcroberts Yes i'm building from git directory.

pi@raspberrypi:/tpm2-pkcs11 $ sudo apt-get install autoconf
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
autoconf is already the newest version (2.69-10).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 27 not upgraded.
pi@raspberrypi:/tpm2-pkcs11 $ sudo apt-get install autoconf-archive
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
autoconf-archive is already the newest version (20160916-1).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 27 not upgraded.

pi@raspberrypi:/tpm2-pkcs11 $ git remote -v
origin https://github.com/tpm2-software/tpm2-pkcs11.git (fetch)
origin https://github.com/tpm2-software/tpm2-pkcs11.git (push)
pi@raspberrypi:/tpm2-pkcs11 $ git rev-parse HEAD
295aa29
pi@raspberrypi:~/tpm2-pkcs11 $ git describe --always
295aa29

[williamcroberts]

Ahh you need to install a newer autoconf-archive, or copy the contents into the projects m4 directory (create if it doesn't exist)

http://mirror.team-cymru.com/gnu/autoconf-archive/autoconf-archive-2018.03.13.tar.xz

You should just be able to copy the m4 directory from that archive into the tpm2-pkcs11 project.

[nagesh20]

@williamcroberts Thank you , it works now. Closing issue.

[PeterHuewe]

Hi,
@williamcroberts :
I'd like to re-open this issue - it breaks the installation on a recent raspbian and thus probably on all debian stretch based installations - which is annoying.
As a first time user or drive-by-contributor I immediately dismiss software if the bootstrap/configure fails for some obscure reasons.

Yes there is a workaround - but it also used to work in the past without problems.
If we want to have tpm2-pkcs11 packaged, we should come up with a suitable solution.
(e.g. use some less modern macros)

[williamcroberts]

Hi,
@williamcroberts :
I'd like to re-open this issue - it breaks the installation on a recent raspbian and thus probably on all debian stretch based installations - which is annoying.
As a first time user or drive-by-contributor I immediately dismiss software if the bootstrap/configure fails for some obscure reasons.

Me too, but you should follow the building instructions of every project:
https://github.com/tpm2-software/tpm2-pkcs11/blob/master/docs/BUILDING.md

I documented in length you need this version of autoconf-archive. The great thing is, you don't have to install it, no root required. You can just copy it to m4 dir for your build or another approach could be using -I option to bootstrap. The TSS libraries will have the same requirement soon, as they need to drop their copies of this. We shouldn't be distributing these m4 macros in our source tree nor carrying patches for them.

Debian stretch's packaged version is: 20160916
Since that their's been 3 releases and 2 years, with stretch version 9.6 being released on November 10th, 2018. They could have easily pulled in the latest, it's backwards compatible. But I am not sure of their policies of changing packaged versions for stable releases, my guess that its not allowed.

Yes there is a workaround - but it also used to work in the past without problems.
If we want to have tpm2-pkcs11 packaged, we should come up with a suitable solution.
(e.g. use some less modern macros)

You only need to satisfy this dependency for building, an actual packager can simply setup the m4 macro dependency and build a Debian package out. An actual Debian package in the package manager won't have any build time dependencies.

[rickydjohn]

Hi, I am still seeing this error when building on a deb-9 machine. I tried what was recommended by @williamcroberts. That didn't seem to work in my case.

Thanks in advance for your support.

[PeterHuewe]

@rickydjohn - for me I have to specify ./bootstrap -I m4 after copying the contents of autoconf-archive.
See my detailed guide at: https://github.com/PeterHuewe/tpm2-pkcs11/blob/greengrass-hsi/docs/Enable-Greengrass-HSI.md#install-tpm2-pkcs11