Build directory path saved in Meta/hsearch.rds
On Fri, 3 Mar 2006, Jos? Matos wrote:
On 03/03/06, Jos? 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, -- Jos? Matos
-- Jos? Ab?lio
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