openwall / openwall/john

Improve the configure script's error messages on missing OpenSSL

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#4,061 3 comments 0 reactions 1 assignee View on GitHub

@magnumripper is already working on this.

Since Apr 7, 2021.

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Description

As prompted by #4058:

Can we somehow improve the configure error message "JtR requires libssl being installed" to be more helpful?

Maybe we should refer to doc/INSTALL from configure's error message, and to INSTALL-UBUNTU and INSTALL-FEDORA and INSTALL-WINDOWS from there. Right now, doc/INSTALL does mention needing libssl and gives Debian/Ubuntu package names as an example, but it does not refer to the other INSTALL-something files - perhaps we should improve that.

Maybe we should rename INSTALL-FEDORA to INSTALL-REDHAT, so that people would know it also applies to RHEL and CentOS? OTOH, now there's also Red Hat CoreOS, and I don't know what instructions would apply to it. And people might not associate their CentOS with Red Hat. And there's the yum vs. dnf difference for RHEL up to 7 vs. newer Fedora, although I think there's still a yum wrapper even in the latest?

Separately, we should also work towards removing the dependency on OpenSSL.

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