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

[Tom Lane]

Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> writes:
> 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 don't know all that much about the conventions for this under Linux,
but I'm familiar with other Unix-oid platforms where shared libraries
*must* have execute permission or they flat out don't work.  (HPUX is
that way for sure, and I think most BSDen as well.)  So it would not be
surprising for upstreams to prefer to install 0755 everywhere for
portability.  I think Debian is on the wrong side here, if your
informant is correct about their policy in the first place ...

			regards, tom lane