Lack of dependency generation in nsock makefile

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 08:38:53PM -0800, Fyodor wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 12:52:15PM -0600, Nelson wrote:
> > nevermind... make clean and distclean fixed the issue
>
> This makes me wonder if the Nmap (or dependencies such as nbase,
> nsock, etc.) Makefile dependency tracking is working properly.  Has
> anyone else been noticing this problem (where you have to do make
> clean after an svn update in your sandbox because a plain 'make' fails
> to compile some of the new code files)?

This just happened to me again today while working in nsock. It wasn't
after an update, it was after modifying some files.

Scanning 3 services on localhost (127.0.0.1)
nmap: nsock_connect.c:158: nsock_connect_tcp: Assertion `nsi->state == NSIOD_STATE_INITIAL || nsi->state == 
NSIOD_STATE_UNKNOWN' failed.
Aborted

I finally looked at the nsock makefile. It doesn't do automatic
dependency generation with a makefile.dep file like nmap and ncat do.
The only dependencies it knows are of .o files on their .c counterparts,
so if something changes in a header included by a .c file, the .c won't
get rebuilt. You can try it yourself with

        touch nsock/src/nsock_internal.h
        make

Nothing will get recompiled, even though there are a lot of files that
include nsock_internal.h.

I will see about fixing this, or have a bug wrangler do it, if nobody
offers a patch first.

David Fifield

_______________________________________________
Sent through the nmap-dev mailing list
http://cgi.insecure.org/mailman/listinfo/nmap-dev
Archived at http://SecLists.Org