Re: [screen-devel] [EXT] Re: Making screen a literate executable

[Krish Jain]

Intriguing suggestion! That's a different way to implement literacy.
Tavis's suggestion works on GNU/Linux. What would be the best way to
incorporate Tavis's suggestion into the screen build process?

Best,

Krish


On Thu, Feb 1, 2024 at 2:31 PM Tavis Ormandy <taviso@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On 2024-01-19, Krish Jain wrote:
> > If you folks like the basic idea, we could create a tidy git branch with
> > literacy "baked in," thus eliminating the need for the top-level
> > literatize script.  One unconventional aspect of the process is that a
> > tarball must be created that is then embedded into the executable
> > immediately after the executable is linked.  If you have any guidelines or
> > suggestions for how best to do this, please advise. First, please kick the
> > tires & let us know how it goes.
> >
>
> I didn't read the whole paper, but it occurs to me that if this is
> something you want, it is easy to do without any source modifications.
>
> For example, you could just do something like:
>
> $ objcopy --add-section=.srccode=screen.tar.gz /usr/bin/screen /usr/bin/screen
>
> Then to extract the source code:
>
> $ objcopy --dump-section=.srccode=screen.tar.gz /usr/bin/screen
>
> The advantage of this method is that you can also set section flags to
> make it non-load (so effectively zero impact on load performance or
> rss), and it's easy to strip out (--remove-section) if you want to save space.
>
> Just a thought!
>
> Tavis.
>
> --
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