Failed building SWI-Prolog from source

General
1

Hello,

I failed building SWI-Prolog from source with this error. Can anyone help?

$ ninja
ninja: error: ‘…/man/ssl’, needed by ‘man/lib/prologpack.tex’, missing and no known rule to make it

2

You probably didn’t install the libssl-dev dependency. See https://www.swi-prolog.org/build/Debian.txt for a full list of dependencies. Partial builds (leaving out some components) is not well supported for many combinations of extensions. Typically, just build the whole lot (least trouble) or just the core system if you want a minimal system, typically to be embedded in a service.

3

I got it. Thanks.

4

Hello,

I’m having the same problem here:

mcristia@maxi:~/tmp/swipl-devel/build$ ninja 
ninja: error: 'man/ssl', needed by 'man/lib/prologpack.tex', missing and no known rule to make it

Following Jan’s answer I tried installing libssl-dev (sorry for the Spanish):

mcristia@maxi:~/tmp/swipl-devel/build$ sudo apt-get install libssl-dev
Leyendo lista de paquetes... Hecho
Creando árbol de dependencias... Hecho
Leyendo la información de estado... Hecho
libssl-dev ya está en su versión más reciente (3.0.13-0ubuntu3.4).
0 actualizados, 0 nuevos se instalarán, 0 para eliminar y 7 no actualizados.

but it was already installed. I tried also installing libssl-doc but I’m still getting the same error:

mcristia@maxi:~/tmp/swipl-devel/build$ ninja 
ninja: error: 'man/ssl', needed by 'man/lib/prologpack.tex', missing and no known rule to make it

Also looked at Prerequisites for Debian based systems (Ubuntu, Mint, ...) and installed everything mentioned there.

5

Try re-running cmake . in the build dir. That should complain about the missing ssl. Does it? If so, you need to check the Cmake log/error files to see why. AFAIK, this should all build nicely on a wide range of Linux distributions and Prolog versions. But, sometimes there are failures as a result of broken installations, unexpected environment variables, etc :frowning:

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6

It worked!!! Thanks a lot!!!

So the sequence is: if ninja gives that error, install libssl-dev, rerun cmake and then ninja again.

1 Like