“openssl/ssl.h: No such file or directory” during Installation of Git

Question

Trying to install git on the Unix and Linux machines based on the instructions on Installing Git blog, and it is failing with the below error

make prefix=/u         


        

Answer 1

If you do not have access to prebuilt packages for the required libraries, you have to resort to the age-old practice from before there were package managers: Build the libraries locally, and the libraries they depend on, and the libraries they depend on, and so on.

In other words, you are in for a potentially large and complex maze of dependency chasing, which might include fixing portability bugs for your platform if the source does not compile out of the box.

The Debian PTS has links to upstream projects for many packages, so you might not need to guess which result to pick out of Google results for "openssl source". See e.g. http://packages.qa.debian.org/o/openssl.html (the "Browse source code" link is a good start; the Debian Copyright file for each package should also contain an upstream URL, although it may be historical).

Also:

• http://packages.qa.debian.org/c/curl.html
• http://packages.qa.debian.org/e/expat.html
• http://packages.qa.debian.org/g/gettext.html
• http://packages.qa.debian.org/z/zlib.html

If you have a package manager locally (on Debian, that would be the basic dpkg) then you can avoid the finding and compiling morass, and just copy the required hierarchy of depended packages from an Internet-connected host; but again, make sure you get the full set of recursive dependencies (anything that a package you depend on in turn depends on, recursively). E.g. https://packages.debian.org/stable/openssl shows you which packages the openssl Debian package depends on; some of those will have a similar list of dependencies of their own, in turn.