Older blog entries for Demie (starting at number 2)

Dear diary...

So I wasted a couple trying to only find out that I can't use getenv in _init. Wouldn't be a hudge problem, if everything else like malloc and friends wouldn't work in _init in a LD_PRELOADed library but they do. So that's one Sunday evening I'm not getting back. Howerver when I woke up this morning, I looked @ zlibc and artsdsp source to find out how they do things. I figured they'd have the same problem (and a sollution). Wow, zlibc is old and I really would hate using the environ variable. However artsdsp way of doing things works here, so I stole the idea, and now it's smooth sailing again.

So I'm still hacking install watch.

I attempted to autotoolize the package, but I gave up. libtool is such a pain in the ass, i want to build a library called installwatch.so _not_ libinstallwatch.so, and I only want it to be be a shared library (never a static one). Never mind the lib prefix for now, it won't even add me -nostartfiles to LDFLAG (because it will automatically strip it too). Sheesh. If anyone is familiar with autotools / libtool better then me please email me how I can get this done (mtanski@gmail.com).

I did get a lot of things done tho; I cleaned up the files a ton. I moved some things into separate files and headers, and I started working on the fake chroot install. That's going good so far.

So i finally gave into peer pressure and start my self a new shiny blog.

So I haven't worked on Lunar-Linux for ages, and I felt like doing something productive so I figured I'd do something productive. I'm not nececesarly working stuff for lunar per say. I'm working to create tools to scratch an itch.

So right now I'm hacking on installwatch, I want to add some code to support installing into a different root then /. A lot of non autotoolized packages don't support the DESTDIR variable in their Makefiles or are broken. Sounds kinda tricky, and it is because quite a few apps read files, or modify files during the make install stage The modify part right now is not a huge concern for me right now because installwatch has a backup directory. The reading of a file on disk is a bigger issue. I think i'll be somewhat easy to implement it, check if file exists in the fake root; if not then copy that file from / to the fake root, and then allow the app to work on it. Or combine the backup and real logic. I also thought about using ptrace to trap syscalls to get around some of the install watch weakness (setuid or statically linked binaries), but that would be a big pain in the ass and non portable, so i abandoned this for now.