[Fedora-packaging] Re: New draft packaging guidelines for OCaml

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2008 at 10:47:23PM +0100, Dominik 'Rathann' Mierzejewski wrote:
> On Saturday, 01 March 2008 at 18:01, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> [...]
> > And:
> > 
> >  - certain binaries should not be stripped
> >    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=435559
> 
> I assume that using ocamlc -custom is absolutely necessary there.
> My guess is this is either a bug in strip (stripping what it shouldn't)
> or in ocamlc (generating invalid ELF objects).

It's kind of a gross bug in ocamlc.  It appends the bytecode to the
end of the executable and writes a trailer after that, and at runtime
it reads its own bytecode from /proc/self/exe.

Yuck!

Luckily it only does this with the -custom option, and it turns out
that such binaries are quite rare.  I only found a problem in 2 out of
68 OCaml-built binaries that we ship in Fedora.

There's some background and commentary from upstream in the Debian
bug: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=256900

Anyhow we ought to ship native code versions of everything we possibly
can.  It's silly shipping slow old bytecode when you've got a native
code compiler that's almost as fast as C.  Maybe this should be
another packaging guideline?

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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