Re: Using apt on a security relevant system (esp: PGP/GPG, scp, perl)

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Mon, Jan 03, 2000 at 04:49:48PM +0000, Marc Haber wrote:
> I recently learned "by accident" that apt depends on perl. In the
> future, I will be working on a security relevant system, would like to
> use apt for centralized updates but wouldn't want to have perl on that
> system. Thus, I would like to learn how vital perl is for apt. As I
> can see, apt-get is a binary.

what's the big problem with perl?

just about anything you can do in a perl script, you can do with sh and
other tools (perl just makes it easier).

i think you'll have less trouble and find it much easier to just chmod
/usr/bin/perl so that it's only executable by root. you can add a line
to /etc/suid.conf from the suidmanager package to make sure that the
permissions stay at 700 if perl ever gets upgraded.

craig

--
craig sanders