[Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>]

Debian's reproducible-builds machinery has discovered a problem in the
SSL tests: When building with SSL support, but /usr/bin/openssl
missing (i.e "libssl-dev" installed, but "openssl" missing), the tests
fail in subtle ways:

checking for openssl... no
configure: using openssl: openssl not found
checking for openssl/ssl.h... yes
checking for openssl/err.h... yes

build/src/test/ssl/tmp_check/log/regress_log_001_ssltests:
Can't exec "x509": No such file or directory at t/001_ssltests.pl line 751.
couldn't run " x509" to get client cert serialno at t/001_ssltests.pl line 775.

build/src/test/ssl/tmp_check/log/regress_log_003_sslinfo:
[08:42:02.209](0.029s) ok 11 - ssl_client_serial() compared with pg_stat_ssl
psql:<stdin>:1: ERROR:  invalid X.509 field name: "invalid"
[08:42:02.238](0.029s) ok 12 - ssl_client_dn_field() for an invalid field

Full build log: https://reproduce.debian.net/amd64-pull184/api/v1/builds/66623/log

The problem does not show up on the normal Debian build daemons. While
the build environment there is fairly minimal, it does have "openssl"
preinstalled. So I cannot yet say if this problem is new in PG18, or
just never got detected in older branches.

While it is probably possible to skip the tests when the configure
probe did not find the openssl binary, IMHO the configure check should
already fail. That's more robust and easier.

Attached is a WIP patch that implements that for autoconf.

Christoph

Attachments:

  [text/x-diff] v1-0001-openssl-should-not-be-optional.patch (1.2K, ../aNPSp1-RIAs3skZm@msg.df7cb.de/2-v1-0001-openssl-should-not-be-optional.patch)
  download | inline diff:
From c6146aba7f09df30f4effe304f45f27bcb9975ac Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2025 11:11:35 +0000
Subject: [PATCH v1] "openssl" should not be optional

---
 configure.ac | 9 ++++++---
 1 file changed, 6 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

diff --git a/configure.ac b/configure.ac
index e44943aa6fe..ac0dccdeab5 100644
--- a/configure.ac
+++ b/configure.ac
@@ -1576,10 +1576,13 @@ if test "$with_gssapi" = yes ; then
 	[AC_CHECK_HEADERS(gssapi_ext.h, [], [AC_MSG_ERROR([gssapi_ext.h header file is required for GSSAPI])])])
 fi
 
-PGAC_PATH_PROGS(OPENSSL, openssl)
-pgac_openssl_version="$($OPENSSL version 2> /dev/null || echo openssl not found)"
-AC_MSG_NOTICE([using openssl: $pgac_openssl_version])
 if test "$with_ssl" = openssl ; then
+  PGAC_PATH_PROGS(OPENSSL, openssl)
+  if test -z "$OPENSSL"; then
+    AC_MSG_ERROR([openssl not found])
+  fi
+  pgac_openssl_version="$($OPENSSL version 2> /dev/null || echo openssl not found)"
+  AC_MSG_NOTICE([using openssl: $pgac_openssl_version])
   AC_CHECK_HEADER(openssl/ssl.h, [], [AC_MSG_ERROR([header file <openssl/ssl.h> is required for OpenSSL])])
   AC_CHECK_HEADER(openssl/err.h, [], [AC_MSG_ERROR([header file <openssl/err.h> is required for OpenSSL])])
 fi
-- 
2.51.0