Hi all,

When I started using prelink and portage some apps started to segfault
in the portage compile/install environment. This was traced to the
LD_PRELOAD environmental variable. Prelinked apps don't like being
LD_PRELOADed.

Most of / all these problems are due to buggy / nonstandard compile
methods and glibc bugs with preloading and prelink (one glibc bug has
already been fixed)

As a work around to the above problems and a permanent fix to sandbox
problems I started working on jrray's fakeroot portage patch ( look at
http://cvs.gentoo.org/~jrray )

What was needed was for compiles to be done by a normal unprivileged
user ( like nobody, or the new portage user ) without ANY sandbox or
other library being preloaded. This fixes most compile time problems
with things like emacs. This is also supported by all package I know as
it is the normal manual install method most people use.

This safe as the user has no write permissions to most of the file
system. Also the functions of sandbox are not needed during compile as
during this stage nothing needs to be installed properly.

Then the install stage can be done as root with libsandbox as normal as
during this stage no tricky library manipulations are being done so
LD_PRELOAD will not interfere.

The attached patch only uses sandbox, but can be easily hacked to use
fakeroot instead/as well. The patch is a radical hack of jrray's
version.

It can also be found at

http://cvs.gentoo.org/~cretin/portage-prelink+fakeroot.patch

Install:
Install prelink if you want to prelink, you can use the patch without
prelink to get the unpriv user compile feature.

Then apply patch:
This a patch against the portage-2.0.44.tar.bz2 tarball found in
/usr/portage so add to the portage ebuild
cd ${S} ; bzip2 -dc /path/to/portage-prelink+fakeroot.patch | patch -p1
|| die

Next add a "portage" group and a user called "portage" with home dir at
/home/portage. Finally add prelink to FEATURES in make.conf if you want
prelink.

Now watch the breakages ....
(only joking, it works fine for me )

Is software ever finished?

-- 
Stefan Jones <cretin@gentoo.org>
Gentoo Linux