Re: first draft of "relocatable" module

[Bruno Haible]

Ralf Wildenhues wrote:
> > Indeed, it would have to be documented in the user's documentation that
> > the relocatable module doesn't work on OpenBSD when shared libraries are
> > involved.
> 
> Well.  On systems where Libtool hardcodes an absolute soname.  1.5.22
> does it, and 1.5.24 will do it, but 2.0 will not do it any more on
> OpenBSD.

OK, I'm documenting it like this:

--- doc/relocatable.texi        1 Mar 2007 02:07:56 -0000       1.1
+++ doc/relocatable.texi        2 Mar 2007 01:24:51 -0000
@@ -33,7 +33,9 @@
 
 Installation with @option{--enable-relocatable} will not work for
 setuid or setgid executables, because such executables search only
-system library paths for security reasons.
+system library paths for security reasons.  Also, installation with
address@hidden might not work not OpenBSD, when the
+package contains shared libraries and libtool versions 1.5.xx are used.
 
 The runtime penalty and size penalty are negligible on GNU/Linux (just
 one system call more when an executable is launched), and small on


> But there are some ancient or rarer systems where it will
> still happen.

These systems (Unixware etc.) are not worth mentioning today.

> >   for example, --prefix=/tmp/inst$$.
> 
> This bit doesn't.  Since /tmp is usually world-writable, you've got your
> attack vector already.

/tmp is world-writable but a directory created by a user in /tmp is not
world-writable (assuming an umask of at least 002). Therefore I don't see
a security problem here.

Bruno