Saturday, June 27, 2015

syntax-error-in-debian-changelog while building openssl from source

I was building Openssl the other day as described in Zen Load Balancer 3.0.3 Perfomance and Security Customization Part 2, but instead of everything going fine as usual, I received this error message:

W: openssl: syntax-error-in-debian-changelog line 49 "couldn't parse date Thy, 8 Jan 2015 22:10:07 +0100"
W: openssl: non-standard-dir-perm etc/ssl/private/ 0700 != 0755
W: libssl-doc: syntax-error-in-debian-changelog line 49 "couldn't parse date Thy, 8 Jan 2015 22:10:07 +0100"
W: libssl-dev: syntax-error-in-debian-changelog line 49 "couldn't parse date Thy, 8 Jan 2015 22:10:07 +0100"
W: libssl1.0.0: hardening-no-fortify-functions usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/openssl-1.0.0/engines/libatalla.so
W: libssl1.0.0: syntax-error-in-debian-changelog line 49 "couldn't parse date Thy, 8 Jan 2015 22:10:07 +0100"
E: libssl1.0.0: no-debconf-config
W: libssl1.0.0: postinst-uses-db-input
W: libssl1.0.0-dbg: syntax-error-in-debian-changelog line 49 "couldn't parse date Thy, 8 Jan 2015 22:10:07 +0100"
Finished running lintian.

It's obvious that someone made an error when entering the changelog's date ("couldn't parse date Thy, 8 Jan 2015 22:10:07 +0100" should obviously be Thu, 8 Jan 2015 22:10:07 +0100).

What you need to do is start the process all over again (remove any files/folders etc you worked on and do apt-get source openssl). Then, just go to the offending line of the debian/changelog file (49 in our case), manually change the error (Thy to Thu) and do the rest of the installation as you would do normally.

[root@hadoop1 ~]# vi debian/changelog
....
 -- Kurt Roeckx   Thu, 8 Jan 2015 22:10:07 +0100
....

That's it!