[Rd] Build directory path saved in Meta/hsearch.rds
Prof Brian Ripley
ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Sat Mar 4 09:07:39 CET 2006
On Fri, 3 Mar 2006, José Matos wrote:
> On 03/03/06, José Matos <jaomatos at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> in Fedora Extras we build R packages to a temporary directory. The
>> relevant section in
>> the spec file is this:
>>
>> %build
>> cd ..; R CMD INSTALL %{packname} -l %{buildroot}%{_libdir}/R/library
>>
>> It works. :-)
>>
>> We noticed one problem though (I will assume working on ix86 here) the
>> temporary build path is saved in
>> /usr/lib/R/library/*/Meta/hsearch.rds, i.e. for each package.
>
> Searching a little bit more I see that Peter Daalgard came to the
> same conclusion one month ago:
> https://stat.ethz.ch/pipermail/r-help/2006-February/086069.html
Yes, and his conclusion holds as well.
Please explain what the problem is. The first element of the object saved
in hsearch.rds is a data frame with a column LibPath. This is not used
by help.search() after installation.
>> To see this is enough to run strings over these file.
>>
>> Is this a security concern?
Why should there be any security issues about a non-existent path?
>> Does R uses this path in any way?
Peter was referring to packages installed with R. If they were used, no
binary installation of R would work, so I presume they are not used.
>> In case the answer is yes, it is safe to run sed over this file and do
>> a textual replacement?
Not safe: the string lengths are encoded in the file.
>>
>> Thanks and best regards,
>> --
>> José Matos
>>
>
> --
> José Abílio
>
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>
--
Brian D. Ripley, ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk
Professor of Applied Statistics, http://www.stats.ox.ac.uk/~ripley/
University of Oxford, Tel: +44 1865 272861 (self)
1 South Parks Road, +44 1865 272866 (PA)
Oxford OX1 3TG, UK Fax: +44 1865 272595
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