Compressed exec and core files

[H.J. Lu]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 12:30 PM, Michael Eager <eager@eagerm.com> wrote:
> On 01/23/15 12:19, H.J. Lu wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Michael Eager <eager@eagerm.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm working on a patch to BFD to support opening compressed
>>> exec and core files transparently.  When bfd_fopen is called
>>> to open a compressed file, the file would be decompressed into
>>> a temporary file, and the bfd for the temp returned.  Compression
>>> with gzip and bzip2 would be supported (others can be added later).
>>>
>>> This seems pretty straight-forward.  Any thoughts or comments?
>>
>>
>> Are you going to fork/exec gzip/bzip2 for this or call zlib/bzip2-libs?
>
>
> Could do either.  Exec is simpler.  libz.so is currently a dependency,
> adding libbzip2.so wouldn't be a big deal, but this might be a slippery
> slope, where each added compression results in another library dependency.
>
> Using exec means that the decompress program needs to be on the path, but
> the failure mode if it is not found is pretty transparent.
>

I really don't like fork/exec.  I strongly prefer zlib/bzip2-libs.  You can
use dlopen to load compression library on demand.

-- 
H.J.