Adding package information to ELF objects

Posted Nov 3, 2021 18:15 UTC (Wed) by developer122 (guest, #152928)
Parent article: Adding package information to ELF objects

It's going to be enormous fun when people share these libraries and executables around between their systems, for example when working around hard-to-compile buggy software. I've seen plenty of people on gihub go "naw man, it doesn't compile with foo 1.3 because of a bug. Here, take my distro's copy of foo 1.2.x"

Adding package information to ELF objects

Posted Nov 3, 2021 21:46 UTC (Wed) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link]

Dealing with this kind of situation is exactly why they want to tag the ELF header with this information. Tracking down what's happening with buggy software is hard enough; figuring it out when people are trying to fix the problem by swapping software around is that much harder. But tagging the software itself with this kind of origin information will at least make it possible to figure out which exact version of the software is running.

Adding package information to ELF objects

Posted Nov 4, 2021 14:15 UTC (Thu) by Paf (subscriber, #91811) [Link]

Why is it going to be “enormous fun”? It will give more information about the crazy things users are doing, no more. It might give a clue as to what they’re doing in otherwise nonsensical bug reports?