wtf ... Something strips installed binaries???

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Tue, Sep 02, 2008 at 09:44:39AM -0400, Frank Ch. Eigler wrote:
> "Richard W.M. Jones" <rjones at redhat.com> writes:
> > [...]
> > Really, cronjobs shouldn't be modifying files in /usr/bin.  Save data
> > in /var/, or modify the ELF format to make it more efficient so it
> > doesn't need prelink.
> 
> (Fully successful prelinking is a function of the system-wide set of
> shared libraries, not of a single executable, so it's not quite that
> easy.)
> 
> But another concern re. prelink doing this stripping is ... how does
> it know that the debug data it is losing is in fact expendable?  What
> if someone installed an RPM or a hand-made executable that was built
> with CFLAGS=-g and without RPM-split debuginfo?  That information
> would be totally lost.

Prelinking doesn't do stripping, it rewrites even the non-alloced sections
like debugging sections and if it doesn't succeed rewriting them, it doesn't
touch the binary (or library).  Likely the binary has just some data
appended to it and the authors haven't bothered to put it into a proper
ELF non-allocated section instead, obviously both stripping and prelinking
won't preserve randomly inserted data somewhere outside of the ELF sections.
Both strip and prelink expect ELF objects, not some ad-hoc ELF plus
something format.

	Jakub