Subject: Re: bug#33300: hplip 3.18.9 contains non-free binary blobs

From: [email-masked] (Ludovic Courtès)
Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2018 15:41:28 +0100

Hi!

Tobias Geerinckx-Rice <[email-masked]> skribis:

> Ludovic Courtès wrote:
>> I tried removing them with a snippet (patch attached), but
>> installation
>> eventually fails while trying to link against libImageProcessor,
>> which
>> is now missing.
>
> If I correctly read the Debian maintainer's post in the bug you
> linked[0], it's possible to revert only the libImageProcessor
> infec^Waddition. If it's all right with everyone, I'd like to give
> that a try first.

Indeed, the Debian patch Efraim linked to does exactly that.  So it
should be easy to solve.  Let’s see if Efraim or another one of us can
get it done soon!

> Aside, -ish: looks like most distributions there found out about this
> file due to some failing sanity check. Perhaps we could add our own,
> in ‘guix lint’ or at build time, to warn about ELF files and other
> suspicious binaries in post-snippet sourceballs?

Commit b17004f9f9541acbd07b45e35222e431427bfde0 added a -Wl,-rpath flag;
perhaps that was due to address an error in libImageProcessor.so
detected by ‘validate-runpath’?

That said, we could have a post-unpack phase that fails when ELF files
are found.  The problem is that there are exceptions, in particular
“yogurt software” (compilers, mostly).  So we’d have to manually fix
every exception.

> No idea if it's worth the trouble/performance hit/false-positive rate,
> of course. That's for the ner^Wgods to decide.

Yeah I wonder if it would be fruitful.

Ludo’.