Re: relocatable by default?

[Sylvain Beucler]

On Wed, Oct 03, 2007 at 01:40:32PM +0200, Bruno Haible wrote:
> Hello Sylvain,
> 
> Sylvain Beucler wrote:
> > I noticed that even if I imported the 'relocatable-prog' module,
> > ./configure still requires the user to type '--enable-relocatable' to
> > take this into account.
> > 
> > I guess that most users won't notice this switch, and compile a
> > non-relocatable binary.
> > 
> > Is there a reason why ENABLE_RELOCATABLE is not set to 1 by default?
> 
> There are two reasons:
> 
>   1) On all platforms except Linux, --enable-relocatable creates wrappers
>      for each installed program, thus slowing down a bit the startup time
>      of the programs. It is not wise to have the default behaviour depend
>      on the platform, so I prefer to have it turned off by default.
> 
>   2) There is a security issue involved when installing shared libraries with
>      --enable-relocatable, if the documentation in doc/relocatable.texi
>      is ignored. I wouldn't bet that every user of --enable-relocatable
>      actually reads and follows this documentation.

Hmm, that's too bad. If it's not done by default there's little chance
it'll actually be used, especially in distributions.

What security issues, by the way? I (re)read the docs but I don't see
what it is.

-- 
Sylvain