[Gllug] coreutils checksums

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 02:27:05PM +0100, James Courtier-Dutton wrote:
> On 13 June 2011 14:11, James Hawtin <oolon at ankh.org> wrote:
> > Steve Parker wrote:
> >>
> >> Am I missing something obvious (I'm sure that I am!)
> >>
> > I think what you are seeing is the effect of prelink. Due to ELF stamps if
> > you compile the same program twice the binaries will differ. Prelink i
> > believe rewrites executables slightly.
> >
> 
> I would not expect the binaries to be different if they came from the
> same install package.
[...]
> "prelink" actually modifies the executable.

Yeah, prelink's design is stupid.  Writing to /usr was always going to
be a bad idea; it should have been written to store metadata about
each file somewhere else, eg. under /var.  Also prelink corrupts
executables that it doesn't understand :-(

However you can invoke prelink in a way that allows you to checksum
the original binary or library, ie. 'prelink -y', 'prelink --md5'
(etc) and 'rpm -V'.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones
Red Hat
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