Tuesday, November 29, 2022
Adventures in updating
Before I go to the trouble of installing the latest version of Apache,
I want to ensure my updates to mod_litbook will compile on the lastest version of Apache.
I've been developing it using Apache 2.4.38,
a version from 2019
(and because I'm using mod_lua it's vulnerable to CVE-2021-44790).
So I pull down the latest version
(as of this writing,
the latest stable version is 2.4.54)
and start compiling.
I then got a compilation error about a missing field in a structure definition. Great! I think. Just how much of my system will I have to have to upgrade? I start investigating and find something odd—said field not only exists, it exists in the source code for Apache! The very codebase I'm compiling. Yet, for some reason, the compiler thinks the field doesn't exist.
At this point, I was reminded of Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” So the compiler must be picking up the incorrect header from somewhere. And “somewhere” ended up being the normal location of all system wide headers. The Apache 2.4.38 versions must have been installed such that such that one could compile Apache modules outside of the Apache source code directories.
It was a matter of identifying all such headers and removing them.
Once I did that,
Apache 2.5.54 compiled cleanly,
along with mod_litbook,
and it's now running fine on my development system.
So that's something else to keep in mind.
Sigh.
