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Re: [News] One Linux Packaging Method to Rule Them (Distros) All

In comp.os.linux.advocacy, [H]omer
<spam@xxxxxxx>
 wrote
on Fri, 24 Aug 2007 17:42:03 +0100
<sbe3q4-0h8.ln1@xxxxxxxxxx>:
> Verily I say unto thee, that Roy Schestowitz spake thusly:
>> Glick brings better standalone application bundles to Linux
>> 
>> ,----[ Quote ]
>> | Glick allows developers to store an entire program and all of its associated 
>> | data in a single self-contained ELF executable
>
> No, no, no, no, no, no ... and *no*.
>
> Linux is *not* Windows for /a reason/. Lack of self-propagating Malware
> is just one of them.
>
> This is the mother of all bad ideas.
>

As a rather pedantic observation: no malware
self-propagates.  Windows is an accomplice. :-)  (Linux can
be, too, under certain conditions.)  Even "self-extraction"
is a misnomer; the general construction is an executable
encapsulating an archive, and the executable has to be
read, too (by the kernel and the microprocessor).

I'm assuming Roy was referring to

http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/08/23/glick-brings-better-standalone-application-bundles-to-linux

which refers to

http://www.gnome.org/~alexl/glick/

I'd complain to RedHat (Alexander Larsson works there, apparently).

The page refers to something called 'fuse'.  This appears to be
a package for implementing file systems in user space; there is
a kernel module involved, which pipes filesystem requests into
a user space.

http://lwn.net/Articles/68104/

is a little blurb thereon.  I'm not sure what's happened to
packages.gentoo.org; apparently it caught a vulnerability
and they're delousing it.  Windows 19,238,416, Linux 1.
(Or thereabouts.  Good luck to them; it's my fave distro.)

The portage tree does refer to sys-fs/fuse, along with
app-emulation/fuse, dev-ruby/fusefs, sys-fs/fuse-python,
sys-fs/python-fuse (??), and sys-fs/sshfs-fuse.

A moronically simple example of an application program using fuse
is at

http://lwn.net/Articles/68106/

This looks extremely interesting, and could probably be used to debug
new file systems in user space.

That kernel module looks a bit dangerous prima facie.  However,
I'm also assuming that the kernel module would have to be activated
via something like

mount -t fuse ??? /mnt/fuse-filesystem

which can only be issued by the superuser.  Caveat superuser.

-- 
#191, ewill3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
New Technology?  Not There.  No Thanks.

-- 
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com


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