On 03/24/2011 02:49 PM, Kevin Kofler wrote:
On Thursday 24 March 2011, you wrote:
> Hmm, I thought there'd be a catch. What's executable permission needed
> for? Isn't that just reading/parsing? I can do some work but I am
> totally unfamiliar with this area.
Files which aren't executable aren't even considered as candidates for being
ELF files to extract debuginfo from.
Without execute permission, you'd have to check EVERY SINGLE installed FILE
for being ELF, that might be a significant performance hit. It'd have to be
tried at least.
OK, so executable permission is used as a tag for identifying ELF files.
It's a little inelegant because there are some negative side effects
from executing those non-executable files.
If, hypothetically, we wanted to change that, is there any other way to
reliably mark ELF files? I could think of those:
- extended filesystem attributes? works but might be FS-dependent
- make the files owned by a special ELF group
- a system-level directory of ELF files maintained by e.g. RPM