Re: libselinux packaging

[Steve Lawrence <slawrence@tresys.com>]

On 10/19/2014 09:40 AM, Nicolas Iooss wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Before the next libselinux release I've looked how libselinux 2.3 have
> been packaged by several distros and it is quite disturbing. Here are
> the strange things I've seen so far, related to the build and
> installation.
> 
> * Fedora deletes a bunch of binaries installed from libselinux/utils/
> and renames some [1]. Arch Linux does this too since the previous
> maintainer tried to follow Fedora as much as possible [2]. Neither
> Debian nor Gentoo delete these binaries, even if they raise Lintian
> warnings for Debian because their man pages don't exist [3]. Moreover,
> as "policyvers" is removed on some distros, refpolicy reimplemented it
> in python [4]. Why are these binaries removed in Fedora?
> 
> * For recent versions of ruby, "pkg-config --cflags ruby" no longer
> works as has to be replaced with "pkg-config --cflags ruby-2.1" (for
> example). Gentoo has a patch for this [5] and Arch is using a
> less-generic sed command to patch this [6]. Debian is doing some magic
> to make things build, with a comment about SELinux build process [7].
> I don't know whether applying the Gentoo patch upstream is fine
> because Fedora is still using "ruby" [8].
> 
> * libselinux forces "-I$(INCLUDEDIR)" into the CFLAGS [9], which
> breaks cross-compilation on Debian [10]. This is also modified on
> Gentoo, which also removes -L$(LIBDIR) and puts $(LDFLAGS) before
> object files [11].

This is required so that we can do things like

  make DESTDIR=~/tmp install

>From the top level and everything still works. Not ideal, but our build
system isn't quite sophisticated enough to be able to get rid of that.
Attempts have been made to improve it, but none of them really stuck.

> * There is also a bug about creating /usr/lib/libselinux.so symlink to
> a non-existing file on systems where SHLIBDIR and LIBDIR are both
> /usr/lib. I've already reported this issue on GitHub [12].

I'll cut a new (and hopefully last) release candidate shortly that has
this fix issue.

Thanks,
- Steve

> Cheers,
> 
> Nicolas
> Maintainer of SELinux-related packages on Arch Linux since yesterday.
> 
> [1] http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/libselinux.git/tree/libselinux.spec?id=a139be8c7e0cae589591684018775aae1fed71f2#n162
> [2] https://github.com/archlinuxhardened/selinux/commit/a0c3da5b88d622c31f429d003aad16334e16919f#diff-7cdd8d38b65e2926b6f547b0786e9128R64
> [3] https://lintian.debian.org/maintainer/selinux-devel@lists.alioth.debian.org.html#libselinux
> (package selinux-utils)
> [4] https://github.com/TresysTechnology/refpolicy/blob/master/support/policyvers.py
> [5] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/sys-libs/libselinux/files/0005-use-ruby-include-with-rubylibver.patch?revision=1.1&view=markup
> [6] https://github.com/archlinuxhardened/selinux/blob/63e6c3ddbc159775d5d1bfeaa81166e9d429d424/libselinux/PKGBUILD#L34
> [7] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/selinux/libselinux.git/tree/debian/ruby.mk?id=ac18cbf00199db539c888eb81df03d2584bcbb8e#n17
> [8] http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/cgit/libselinux.git/tree/libselinux.spec?id=a139be8c7e0cae589591684018775aae1fed71f2#n5
> [9] https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/blob/libselinux-2.4-rc3/libselinux/src/Makefile#L75
> [10] http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/selinux/libselinux.git/tree/debian/patches/fix-cross-compile.patch?id=938d7da9097de458a70b0f4f8bc24dcefcd0b26b
> [11] http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewvc.cgi/gentoo-x86/sys-libs/libselinux/files/0006-build-related-fixes-bug-500674.patch?revision=1.1&view=markup
> [12] https://github.com/SELinuxProject/selinux/issues/2
> 
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