Dear Geoffrey, thanks for your email.
> I'm the current maintainer of prelink in Debian. The tool is pretty > unloved upstream -- Fedora, where I get sources from, has removed it > entirely in Fedora 23, and the latest release tarball isn't even in the > usual place -- so there's a decent chance that prelink will leave Debian > at some point in the next release cycle. While it's indeed sad that upstream's support is in decline, that's good to know. > It looks like grr only uses prelink to un-prelink things, and that > entire code is conditional on whether /usr/sbin/prelink exists. If I'm > reading this right, that means there's no need to install prelink on the > machines of people who install grr -- no binaries on their machines will > be prelinked, so there's no need to un-prelink anything. So prelink > doesn't need to be a dependency: grr will do the right thing if it's > installed, but will skip over that code if it's not. Taking a closer look at the code, it seems that un-prelinking is done during the post-installation step of customizing (i.e. patching) a set of binary templates (e.g. from [1]) which are later to be deployed to GRR clients via the server. The problem here is that, in case 'prelink' cannot be executed for a binary, the binary in question will be skipped completely and will not be available from the GRR server. During my test in a amd64 stretch VM, this was -- at least -- happening to the Linux RPM templates. So if prelink is not available during runtime (in particular during the time 'grr_config_updater initialize' is run) then client binaries for some platforms WILL be missing in the GRR installation. It would be interesting to see whether this un-prelinking is actually necessary. The relevant code in grr/lib/build.py states that: # Undo all prelinking for libs or the rpm might have checksum # mismatches. but it would need some more testing to see if and how this would impact regular use. Any suggestions? Cheers Sascha [1] https://packages.debian.org/sid/utils/grr-client-templates
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