Re: [Fwd: [gentoo-security] pax and objc]

[Armando Di Cianno]

Still relevant cross-posting..

On 2004-07-02 14:13:45 -0400 Riccardo Mottola <multix@ngi.it> wrote:
> Also libffi is currently inside the gcc trree, so even if  with some 
> tricks
> you can compile it alone, you still need all the top-level of the gcc 
> tree.
> Ffcall on the other hand is a nice, clean, idnependent library.

I had to do these "tricks" to package libffi for gentoo, but it's not 
much of a trick, and only support files that aid building gcc were 
required (about 5 of them or so).

What troubled me, is that when compiling gcc by hand, with all 
appropriate language options for Objective-C, including: 
--enable-shared=libffi, libffi was simply not built what so ever.  
This symptom of it being "parked" as you said, is pretty bad.  That 
and the libffi version from latest gcc cvs wasn't recognized by 
gnustep-back at all, so AFAIK gcc-3.3.3 contains the last libffi 
release that works for me (thought I haven't tried gcc 3.4.x yet).

However, considering that ffcall seems not to work for 64 bit 
architectures, that alone is enough for me to say no to it; we have at 
least amd, intel, and powerpc chips that run 64-bit now, and amd64 
seems pretty popular overall, and powerpc 64 is likely to be quite 
popular among the GNUstep'ers installing on new Mac hardware.  PaX is 
deemed as "extra" or just "nice to have" by some, but those 
implementing a more secure system structure need to know that libffi, 
at the moment, by far seems the better option.

It's just not a good scenario when the default gcc of most distro's is 
somewhere between 3.2.x and 3.3.x, at the moment, and the best libffi 
version available in gcc-3.3.3 is libffi-2.00_beta.  Someone mentioned 
that libffi was being actively maintained again, but this may be the 
case in the 3.5.x branch, but I have not seen much life previously.

Thanks to all, for the informative posts, and feedback.  I hadn't 
realized the farther than GNUstep reaching implications of libffi when 
I first started to look into this.

__Armando Di Cianno