Bug#321718: Upgrade caused many libs to complain about "executable stack"

[Joe Mason <joe@notcharles.ca>]

Package: upgrade-reports
Severity: critical

I just did a dist-upgrade, and every time I try to run a program linked
with libacl (which includes mv, cp, and ls) I get the following error:

error while loading shared libraries: libacl.so.1: cannot enable
executable stack as shared object requires: Error 14

This makes the entire system unusable.

I was able to get around it by downloading a statically linked busybox,
but there are many other libraries doing the same thing (so far I've
found libgcrypt, libcrypto, and libelf, and I'm filing bugs for all of
them).  Notably libgcrypt is used by whatever apt spawns to verify
package signatures, which means that I can't run an apt-get to
completion.

Google suggests this has something to do with "pax", which I've never 
heard of and have certainly never installed or enabled.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: testing/unstable
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: i386 (i686)
Shell:  /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash
Kernel: Linux 2.4.18-bf2.4
Locale: LANG=C, LC_CTYPE=C (charmap=ANSI_X3.4-1968)