Oh boy! I almost don't want to start this discussion because I feel like I am wading into a real can of worms and could start a firestorm of opinions! In my previous thread, Per Jessen asked me to keep the list in the loop about what I am pursuing with vsftpd. So here goes... For those who do not want to do the long read, the short version of this posting is how do I replicate the code and build environment of vsftpd as it was done for the release of OpenSuSE Leap 15.0? This is NOT an easy question with a easy answer either, I tried the obvious and it failed. I have decided to poke into vsftpd because I (and many others if you Google the particular problem that got me started) have encountered an issue with what appears to be a problem in the client/server relationship, with vsftpd being the common denominator. I have not yet discovered what is the exact problem yet, mostly because I do not yet fully grok what the expectations are in the client/server protocols of FTP servers and with SSL/TLS encryption procedures, let alone the fact that I do not yet fully grok the vsftpd code either! ;-) In a nutshell, and again this is mostly speculation, it appears that when the SSL/TLS negotiations begin between a client (such as Filezilla) and vsftpd something can go wrong. I am apparently experiencing such a situation, and from the vsftpd log messages I was able to track down where in the vsftpd code that it first detected a problem. The error message I was seeing was extremely bad and unhelpful (IMHO) - "not a normal exit in vsf_sysutil_wait_get_exitcode" but at least it told me where to look in the code for a clue. I downloaded the source code (more about this later) and began studying it and it appears that this error message is wrapped up (prefaced with "500 OOPS: ") in such a way that it gets sent to the client in a desperate attempt to communicate the problem back to the user. (God only knows what a client/user is expected to do about it, let alone that it will be meaningless to most users!) I have not yet dug into the FTP protocols enough to know if a client is expected to show these messages to the user or not, but it appears (and again I am speculating) that a client such as Filezilla responds instead by telling the user that it received an unexpected TLS packet - "GnuTLS error -15: An unexpected TLS packet was received" Google that to see how much confusion it has caused users over the years! Yet another near useless error message (made worse by hiding the contents of the TLS packet that was received) with no guidance to a solution for the poor user, but that's Filezilla's problem. At this point I decided to explore in the opposite direction and see who is calling this function vsf_sysutil_wait_get_exitcode and I could not find any references to it in the rest of the vsftpd code. I am not undaunted by that fact however, there are other ways to call a function other than through a direct reference, so I decided to compile and build vsftpd so that I could instrument the code myself and see what is going on. I followed the instructions at https://en.opensuse.org/Source_code to get the "Exact source code", unpacked the tar file of source code, and applied two additional patch files that were indicated as being later than the released version of source code. One of the patch files contained changes that fixed a security hole which is nice but not necessary/relevant to the issue I am trying to address nor does it affect any of the code I am looking at. The other patch file fixed an external script, used by Makefile, so that the SSL/TLS libraries could be correctly located and installed if needed. I don't feel it was a good solution, and have a better proposal I could talk about later, but for now it does what is needed. BUT there are two issues that I would like to bring up - The first issue is that in order to build vsftpd I had to figure out what all libraries I needed to install on my system. That is not an easy process, and I had to do some research tracking down which library handled each un-referenced item errors that the build process complained about. This actually surprised me because it wasn't just developer packages and I would have thought that the dependency requirements of a package, such as for vsftpd, would have insured that all other necessary libraries are installed. But apparently there are different dependencies for source code development, and it wasn't just the developer packages, so if that is the case why can't the release developers simply include a list of libraries needed for each source package as well? (Maybe they are and I am not finding it? Or maybe/probably this is related to and caused by the second issue I talk about below... ) I particularly worry about version levels, that were used during the build/release process of vsftpd, of each library package. I just guessed and went with the latest but that may lead to having a version of a program that is different than what was installed by the release. I personally think it would be better if source packages were released like any other package, with a dependency list/tree behind it that insured all necessary libraries, including development packages, were installed. Didn't YaST and Zypper use to do that? The second and more serious issue is that the source code I downloaded is different from what was used in building vsftpd for the OpenSuSE 15.0 release. I know that the version of vsftpd distributed in Leap 15.0 had support for SSL/TLS built in. Yet I had to go into the source code that I downloaded and reconfigure a #define declaration in order to include SSL/TLS support. This is the first of a couple of indications that the source code I downloaded does NOT match up with what was used in the Leap 15.0 distribution. The second indication that the source code is different, came about when I finally managed to build and install vsftpd because I am no longer able to replicate the initial error with it, that got me started on this in the first place! I am apparently getting a different sort of error which I will continue to chase but not the one I wanted to go after. In fact with the new version of vsftpd that I built, there is no calls being made to the aforementioned function vsf_sysutil_wait_get_exitcode. So this is another strong indication, that the source code I downloaded is different, (probably through other configuration #defines or assignments) than what was used during the build of vsftpd for Leap 15.0. Without the patches, and making some changes to configuration parameters, there is no way that the source code I downloaded is the same as what was used during the build of Leap 15.0. And even after having made the changes I made, in order to get vsftpd to compile and build, I have no confidence now that I built and replicated vsftpd as it came with the distro, and for debugging purposes it is extremely important that I be able to do so. There are a lot more issues I could go into, coding standards, code reviews, IDE support to name a few.  I know that open source software development is constrained by resources but these issues should  also be discussed/addressed at some point. Addressing these could help people like myself (an experienced software developer) jump in and rapidly learn/grok code, such as I am doing for vsftpd. I would love to assist with debug and development, but don't want to spend a lot of time overcoming barriers. And that would make it easier for a project such as vsftpd to get more assistance/support. But for the moment, I wonder if the OpenSuSE development team could address the two issues I raised above and change the release process so that the source code and build environment could be managed better and focus on enabling an engineer to be able to replicate what gets released?     Marc.. -- Linux Counter -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org