On Tue, Jan 22, 2002 at 02:24:26PM +0100, Ralf S. Engelschall wrote: > > In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> you wrote: > > > Hey Ralf, do you have any interest in binary relocatability? I see your > > web page talks about installing the same package in multiple locations > > but it appears you mean to do that by recompilation. What do you think of > > my hack to edit binaries at > > http://www.bell-labs.com/nsbd/breloc.html > > That's a nice idea and hack, yes. We talked about this at dinner yesterday. > We only disliked the use of the extra slashes. Sure, it is the only > possibility for such a small hack.
What was it that you and your dinner companions disliked about the extra slashes? Was it that you didn't want them showing up at run-time? Another small additional hack I've thought of (but not tried yet) should work for languages like C which have null-terminated strings: rather than leaving in all the extra slashes in a path, I could just put in an early null terminator. The only trouble I see is that it would only work on C-like languages, but that does cover the majority of the binaries we see. I think I'll add an option for this, or expand the meaning of the '-c' option to do this behavior on files that have any null bytes. > But the greatest would be if one could > really relocate a binary: load it the ELF binary (via GDB's libbfd perhaps?), > change the strings, relocate the changed symbols and create a new ELF out of > it. I know this is a easy to express and horribly to implement idea. But that > would be the greatest ;) Horrible to implement, yes, and it seems it would be very system-dependent. > OTOH the whole issue is not such dramatic for OpenPKG, because we > usually do not care about binaries very much. We always start from the > .src.rpm and use the binary .rpm just in an intermediate step (and > them remove it immediately again). We use and recommend binaries only > for bootstrapping, emergency and mass-installation situations. So the > relocation issue is not such dramatic for us. Nevertheless it would > be great if we could offer this, too. I deal a lot with with mass-installation situations, so that's why it seems like an important issue to me. - Dave Dykstra ______________________________________________________________________ The OpenPKG Project www.openpkg.org Developer Communication List [EMAIL PROTECTED]
