[sane-devel] Unable to Build Sane Backends

[Olaf Meeuwissen]

Hi Adam,

Adam Richter writes:

> Hi, Wes ald Ralph.
>
> I am sorry for not noticing this thread earlier.  This is a known bug
> with the .tar.gz source releases before 1.0.31 and is in the bug
> tracking system at
> https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/-/issues/248 .  1.0.31 should
> build for you.

Thanks for trying to help!  But I must correct you a little bit.  *Our*
source tarballs contain everything needed to build starting with a

  ./configure

The problem is that GitLab automatically adds *their* source tarballs
that only include what we keep in the git repository.  I've submitted
an [issue][1] with GitLab to get this addressed.

 [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/232074

Similarly, people also seem to use the download functionality in the web
interface to get GitLab created source tarballs.  These are just a top
skim of the repository at a given point in the project's history.  They
are the same as you would get from a

  git archive

> The issue is that the releases in a certain range of versions were
> made from git snapshots which did not include ./configure and related
> files that are normally built for a release, and the version of
> configure.ac invokes "git describe --dirty" to figure out the version
> number, which requires a .git directory tree, which is not included in
> the .tar.gz source release.

That'd be the GitLab provided "source archives".
Our [releases][2] include good source archives as long as you download
the sane-backends-$version.tar.gz from the Other section in the Assets.

 [2]: https://gitlab.com/sane-project/backends/-/releases

> Any of the following three solutions should work:
> (a) edit autogen.sh to replace "[git describe --ditry]" with the
> version number you want,
> (b) build 1.0.31 instead,
> (c) build from git clone (you can check out the versions using version
> branch names, which you can see with "git branch -a").
>
> I encourage you to report back if any of the above three options do
> not work for you or if all are inadequate for your situation.

:+1:

> Adam

Hope this helps,
--
Olaf Meeuwissen, LPIC-2            FSF Associate Member since 2004-01-27
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