Petter Reinholdtsen

The chrpath package provide a simple command line tool to remove or modify the rpath or runpath of compiled ELF program. It is almost 10 years since I updated the code base, but I stumbled over the tool today, and decided it was time to move the code base from Subversion to git and find a new home for it, as the previous one (Debian Alioth) has been shut down. I decided to go with Codeberg this time, as it is my git service of choice these days, did a quick and dirty migration to git and updated the code with a few patches I found in the Debian bug tracker. These are the release notes:

New in 0.17 released 2023-11-10:

• Moved project to Codeberg, as Alioth is shut down.
• Add Solaris support (use <sys/byteorder.h> instead of <byteswap.h>). Patch from Rainer Orth.
• Added missing newline from printf() line. Patch from Frank Dana.
• Corrected handling of multiple ELF sections. Patch from Frank Dana.
• Updated build rules for .deb. Partly based on patch from djcj.

The latest edition is tagged and available from https://codeberg.org/pere/chrpath.

As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address 15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.

Coverity is a nice tool to find problems in C, C++ and Java code using static source code analysis. It can detect a lot of different problems, and is very useful to find memory and locking bugs in the error handling part of the source. The company behind it provide check of free software projects as a community service, and many hundred free software projects are already checked. A few days ago I decided to have a closer look at the Coverity system, and discovered that the gnash and ipmitool projects I am involved with was already registered. But these are fairly big, and I would also like to have a small and easy project to check, and decided to request checking of the chrpath project. It was added to the checker and discovered seven potential defects. Six of these were real, mostly resource "leak" when the program detected an error. Nothing serious, as the resources would be released a fraction of a second later when the program exited because of the error, but it is nice to do it right in case the source of the program some time in the future end up in a library. Having fixed all defects and added a mailing list for the chrpath developers, I decided it was time to publish a new release. These are the release notes:

New in 0.16 released 2014-01-14:

• Fixed all minor bugs discovered by Coverity.
• Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project.
• Mention new project mailing list in the documentation.

You can download the new version 0.16 from alioth. Please let us know via the Alioth project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also include a test suite check.

After many years break from the package and a vain hope that development would be continued by someone else, I finally pulled my acts together this morning and wrapped up a new release of chrpath, the command line tool to modify the rpath and runpath of already compiled ELF programs. The update was triggered by the persistence of Isha Vishnoi at IBM, which needed a new config.guess file to get support for the ppc64le architecture (powerpc 64-bit Little Endian) he is working on. I checked the Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora packages for interesting patches (failed to find the source from OpenSUSE and Mandriva packages), and found quite a few nice fixes. These are the release notes:

New in 0.15 released 2013-11-24:

• Updated config.sub and config.guess from the GNU project to work with newer architectures. Thanks to isha vishnoi for the heads up.
• Updated README with current URLs.
• Added byteswap fix found in Ubuntu, credited Jeremy Kerr and Matthias Klose.
• Added missing help for -k|--keepgoing option, using patch by Petr Machata found in Fedora.
• Rewrite removal of RPATH/RUNPATH to make sure the entry in .dynamic is a NULL terminated string. Based on patch found in Fedora credited Axel Thimm and Christian Krause.

You can download the new version 0.15 from alioth. Please let us know via the Alioth project if something is wrong with the new release. The test suite did not discover any old errors, so if you find a new one, please also include a testsuite check.