On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 06:52:07PM +0000, Brett Parker wrote:
> Matthew Garrett <mgarrett@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> <snip />
>
> > > I rephrase: how can you argue that a hand-crafted binary is not
> > > sufficiently modifiable to offer the freedom to study and adapt?
> >
> > How you can argue that a binary output by a compiler is not sufficiently
> > modifiable to offer the freedom to study and adapt?
>
> In that particular case, you've got the output of compiler, therefore
> the authors prefered form of modification is the "source", it's *really*
> got source, there was a before stage, it wasn't a hand crafted binary.
>
> I can see where you're coming from though. I think this is very much an
> edge case, and I doubt that there are *that many* people that would hand
> craft an elf binary without using a compiler chain. Of course, providing
> a binary only also limits which archs you can use it on, which you
> *might* be able to do given C/C++/ObjC/Fortran/SomethingGoesHere source.
>
> I wonder if I'm missing something, somewhere?
I know of one example, but it's pathological, and in fact exists *as* an
example: the various stages of "How small can I make an ELF 'hello world'
binary?" that someone went through.
Actually, I believe the author of that *did* start with a C source -> ELF
binary step, but that became fairly rapidly irrelevant to the example.
I also don't think we should package it as a binary (we might care to
package the entire documentation of the sequence, since it demonstrates
some interesting things about how ELF binaries are built, but that then
becomes a separate question).
--
Joel Aelwyn <fenton@debian.org> ,''`.
: :' :
`. `'
`-
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature