Re: Using guile-ssh

[Taylan Ulrich Bayirli/Kammer]

R Sidhu <address@hidden> writes:

> I am interested in using guile-ssh for file transfer. Ran into the
> following issues:
>
> 1. 'git clone
> https://github.com/artyom-poptsov/guile-ssh/releases/tag/v0.6.0' fails
> with:
> fatal:
> https://github.com/artyom-poptsov/guile-ssh/releases/tag/v0.6.0/info/refs
> not valid: is this a git repository?

Tags on GitHub can be downloaded as a .tar.gz or ZIP, but not cloned if
I'm not mistaken.

> 2. INSTALL file suggests './configure' but its missing

Short story: you need to run either ./autogen.sh, or if that doesn't
exist, run "autoreconf -fi" in the source directory.

Long story:

The ./configure script of a software package is what needs to be run on
the install-site to configure the package for the machine on which it
will be compiled and installed, but this ./configure script is rarely
written by hand, because it must be in the Bourne shell language to be
highly portable across Unix machines, which is a horrible language.
Most commonly, there is a configure.ac file which is written in the more
special-purpose and high-level autoconf language, and the software's
author runs the autoconf command to turn this into a ./configure script
before packaging and shipping the software.  Therefore, when you fetch
the bare source code of a project, you usually have a configure.ac file
but not the ./configure script which it would generate.  Often for
convenience there is a tiny ./autogen.sh script which runs autoconf and
maybe some other things for you (specifically automake), but nowadays
usually running "autoreconf -fi" is the only thing that needs to be
done.

> 3. Installation instructions in doc/ directory (texinfo files) suggest
> 'autoreconf -if' which fails with:
> configure.ac:55: error: possibly undefined macro: AC_DEFINE
> If this token and others are legitimate, please use m4_pattern_allow.
> See the Autoconf documentation.
> autoreconf: /usr/bin/autoconf failed with exit status: 1

I had this problem more than once already but keep forgetting what the
solution was.

Do you have pkg-config installed?  Do you have pkg-config files in
non-standard places, like $HOME/usr/lib/pkgconfig, or
$HOME/.guix-profile/lib/pkgconfig?  If so you'll need to set
PKG_CONFIG_PATH to a colon-separated list of such directories.  (Best to
'export' that in ~/.profile or ~/.bash_login or so.)

Do you have a recent version of GNU m4 installed?

> 4. While initial steps seem clear (establishing session,
> authenticating and creating channel), not clear how to perform file
> transfer.

I've never used guile-ssh so this is a shot in the dark: maybe a simple
read-char / write-char loop to read and write the bytes in a file one by
one?

> Appreciate work done on guile-ssh so far. Look forward to help re
> above.
>
> Regards
> sidhu1f

Hope someone can clear questions 3 and 4.

Taylan