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Re: relocatability tweaks


From: Bruno Haible
Subject: Re: relocatability tweaks
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2008 17:01:52 +0100 (MET)

Hi Paolo,

The goal of your patch appears to be to make it possible for a package to enable
relocatable installation by default. I see three problems with this:

1) This choice should be an installer's choice, not a program developer's 
choice.
   Why? Often a package A depends on a package B which depends on a package C
   etc. In order to install package A relocatable, B and C must also be 
installed relocatable.
   But B and C most likely will not have relocatability enabled by default.

2) Security considerations: The doc/relocatable.texi file mentions that for 
security reasons,
   when a relocatable installation is chosen, --prefix needs to be chosen in a 
particular way.
   With your patch, when gl_RELOCATABLE_DEFAULT is invoked, you have an insecure
   installation by default!

3) Platform dependencies are ignored here. But while --enable-relocatable is 
cheap on
   Linux systems, it is expensive on other platforms: each of the installed 
executables is
   invoked indirectly through a "trampoline executable". This doubles the 
number of fork+exec
   calls. The programmer who chooses gl_RELOCATABLE_DEFAULT should be made
   aware of this downside. (Documentation)

Bruno





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