[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
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