Re: PG Patch (fwd) [openserver patch followup #2] (fwd) - Mailing list pgsql-patches

To keep this on the list.

PG Core: I think Kean makes good points, and adding infrastructure to do it
with absolute pathnames in the shared libs would be a GOOD thing, and let
the
OS Specific maintainer(s) enable as their current or future practice
dictates.

LER


------------ Forwarded Message ------------
Date: Thursday, July 24, 2003 04:33:12 -0700
From: Kean Johnston <jkj@sco.com>
To: Larry Rosenman <ler@lerctr.org>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
Subject: Re: [PATCHES] PG Patch (fwd) [openserver patch followup #2]

>> These concerns might have some merit, but the solution could not possibly
>> be to only fix this on one platform, because the mechanisms are the same
I was not trying to re-architect PostgreSQL's build system. I submitted a
patch for a specific OS that made it behave the way the vendor (us)
recommends you build things. If the PG folks dont want to accept the patch
thats really quite OK with me I will just apply it myself every time there
is a new release. I am not evangelizing for this to be a universal change,
but I thiunk that decling the OS patch becuase all othr OSes haven't done
the same thing is a wee bit harsh, but I have no emotional attachment to
this issue.

>> everywhere.  That said, it seems the universal practice is not to put
>> full sonames into shared libraries, so it seems better that our libraries
>> follow that practice.  Otherwise it will be only a matter of time before
>> someone comes out of the wood and claims that libraries will full sonames
>> are a big whatever-else problem.
I mean no offence when I say that that is an extremely weak argument. It
used to be universal practice that if you wanted a small pause in the
kernel you could do: for (spin = 0; spin < 100; spin++) ; And now
optimizers and faster CPUs and whatever make that plainly wrong. But that
aside I would also say that that position is wrong. libtool goes to some
considerable lengths to figure out how to hard-code paths into shared
libraries. It just rarely gets it right. Much of the "wisdom" about shared
libraries these days comes from folks reading libtool's info page. Most
people just dont care about the issue as long as it sorta-kinda works, so
they just accept what they read. But libtool does many many things
incorrectly, often in the name of expediency. Its not a bad program, it
just has a different design goal. But I digress. If Peter agrees in
principle that not having direct pathnames can be a problem then not at
least taking the time to investigate or analyze the impact becuase of some
potential future misunderstanding of the issue is a bit short-sighted. I
can hear the halls of Microsoft ringing with "hey lets not fix that bug,
someone in the future will complain about it if we do, or chips will get so
fast that people wont mind rebooting their OS every other mouse click" :)

> Universal Practice does NOT equal Security and Usability.
How true ... just look at sendmail :)

*oops* ... was that my aloud voice? :)

Kean

---------- End Forwarded Message ----------



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Larry Rosenman                     http://www.lerctr.org/~ler
Phone: +1 972-414-9812                 E-Mail: ler@lerctr.org
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