Shared library permissions in Debian-land and Red Hat-land

Adam Williamson awilliam at redhat.com
Thu Mar 24 03:52:48 UTC 2011


So, I just ran into an interesting issue talking over Fedora patches
with the upstream glew maintainer. glew installs its shared libraries
'manually', not using autotools / libtools; upstream installs them with
permissions of 0644, and we patch this to 0755. After talking to
upstream, they say they're following Debian conventions here; I don't
have a Debian-land system to confirm, but they say on Debian and Ubuntu,
all shared libs have 0644 permissions.

In Fedora, they have to have 0755 or the auto-provides / auto-depends
scripts don't work.

So, is it true that the convention is 0644 in Debian and 0755 in Red
Hat-land? If so, does anyone know why the difference, and if this needs
to stay different forever? Also, I presume neither of us is patching
several thousand shared library packages for this, so are the
permissions usually set by libtool or something similar, and that's
where the configuration is set?

I just want to understand the situation better :) Thanks to anyone who
knows about this. A cursory Google search didn't find any interesting
information. I see
http://serverfault.com/questions/173853/why-shared-libraries-on-linux-are-executable , but it seems a little confused.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net



More information about the devel mailing list