Prelink success story :)

Keith G. Robertson-Turner redhat-forums at genesis-x.nildram.co.uk
Wed Feb 25 15:58:24 UTC 2004


Guess I've been lucky, but I never really suffered much from the various
prelink related problems that have been reported.

A total of 2 applications (out of 1603 packages) were bØrked by prelink
on my system, since FC1 was released, namely k3b and kdepim (in fact they
still get bØrked even now by prelink).

Being rather pleased with myself for having a 99.88% perfect system, I
took the (maybe) risky step of chasing after the other 0.12%.

I got prelink-0.3.0-21 from (Fedora devel) rawhide, but it needs SELinux.
After getting the SRPM and looking at the spec, I don't see SELinux
listed? Anyway, after some minor modification to the spec (mainly to
satisfy rpmlint) I rebuilt on a clean mach chroot and installed.

Of course the whole purpose of the exercise was to get blacklist support,
so I edited prelink.conf and added twenty or so files that I'd flagged as
problem files (all part of the above two apps). I ran a full prelink and
crossed my finger.

Result: no problems at all. No segfaults and no bØrked apps. Also, and
maybe this is my imagination, but everything seems to be running a *lot*
faster ... even more than after previous prelinking. Even the log file was
relatively clear (just a few complaints about "x" can't be prelinked
because it depends on "y" which also can't be prelinked ... etc. Normal
stuff.

Now for some questions ... not gripes ... just curiosity:

1) ... Is Jakub Jelinek really the *only* guy working on this?

2) ... Other than in the SRPM, where's the source Luke :)
prelink-20040216.tar.bz2 is missing from people.redhat.com/jakub/prelink

3) ... Why was macros.prelink hard coded into the spec as a text block,
rather than as a SourceX file?

4) ... Why isn't there a logrotate file to accompany the included log
file, and come to that, why *package* a log file? Or am I missing
something obvious?

Other minor (rpmlint) observations:

Use of "Copyright" instead of "License"
Weird 555 and 444 perms
Ghost-without-post errors
Use of "/etc" instead of %{_sysconfdir}
Use of %{buildroot} instead of $RPM_BUILD_ROOT (although that seems to be
a point of contention these days, personally I prefer %{buildroot}, since
it is more consistent with the other spec conventions.

Anyway, I'm just really pleased to have blacklist support in prelink
finally, which I guess leads me to one final question ... why hasn't this
version been officially released yet? (Although maybe I've answered this
already above, but the cleaned up version looks pretty good).

Oh, and ... thank you Jakub.

-
K.





More information about the devel mailing list