PTH and Kali - Status

I was directed to this bug report on the Kali list relating to the PTH-suite being missing:

So, where are we at?

I'm working on it.  The big difference between Backtrack and Kali is that Kali is based on Debian and the maintainers are trying to stick to the 'Debian' way of doing things.

When Putehate and I put together the package for Backtrack, we just shoved everything into a single package and stuck it in the repo.  The package didn't have any deps listed, no source was included, etc.  The 'Debian' way of doing things has the package manager itself build the packages from source.  This means that I actually have to pay attention to the extra bits that control package behavior as opposed to just packaging up a bunch of pre-compiled files.

This is actually a good thing because it makes it easier to update individual packages.  Also, it can actually bring less impact to the existing system.  Do you know the difference between PTH Samba 4 + Openchange and regular Samba 4 + Openchange?  One single shared library file.  So if I package that single library up all the existing Samba 4 / Openchange tools can PTH.  Remove that package and you have regular functionality.

Next week I'm on an assessment with Brav0Hax, one of the Kali maintainers and we are going to try to get a bunch of stuff packaged up.  I'll also try to get some functional stuff up on the google code page here in the not too distant future.  Unfortunately in the last year there's been a number of updates on some packages that make my build scripts fail.  I'll try to get that stuff updated sooner rather than later for folks to get back up and going quickly.

I'm also going to see what happens if you just take the package from Backtrack and dump it into Kali.  That could be a messy explosion or it could work fairly well with a couple of minor tweaks.  I'm not sure yet.

Thanks for the patience and know that I'm working on it ;-)