xchat contains a small amount of assembler, the short story of
which causes it to not be exec-shield friendly. If exec-shield
is enabled on one's system, xchat will run with it disabled.
Since it is much preferable for any networked software to benefit
from the type of security benefits that exec-shield provides,
Arjan discovered this problem and wrote a small patch to make
xchat exec-shield friendly.
Arjan's patch is currently applied to xchat-2.0.4-4 which is in
internal rawhide, and hopefully will be pushed out soon.
Please test this heavily with and without exec-shield enabled.
Please file any regressions in bugzilla.
--
Mike A. Harris
ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat