IRC, unknown channel, unknown date.

<youpi> oh my, disabling gzip/bzip2 support makes apt preconfigure hang
<youpi> support in exec* I meant

<youpi> now a funny bug: if I disable gzip/bzip2 support from exec
<youpi> trying to run a zero-byte file hangs

Justus: This doesn't seem to be an issue anymore (2013-09-08):

% touch empty
% chmod +x empty
% ./empty
zsh: exec format error: ./empty
% bash
$ ./empty
$ 

Also I've never encountered a problem with apt.

IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2013-08-01

<teythoon> uh, all the non trivial exec server code has #ifdef'd BFD code
  all over it and it looks like that isn't even used anymore
<teythoon> that's too bad actually, I figured out how to get the values
  from BFD, not so for the other elf parser that is used instead

IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2013-08-05

<teythoon> btw, there is a Debian bug concerning zipped executables. now
  I'm not sure if I understood the problem, but gziped and bzip2ed
  executables work for me
<teythoon> (not that I'm a big fan of that particular feature)
<youpi> iirc these somehow got fixed yes
<youpi> something like a previous out of bound access
<teythoon> the exec server contains lot's of code that is unused and
  probably bit rot (#ifdef BFD) or otherwise ignored (#if 0)
<youpi> yes :/
<teythoon> and there's gunzipping and bunzip2ing, which we probably don't
  want anyway
<pinotree> why not?
<teythoon> we should strip all that from exec and start adding features
<teythoon> pinotree: b/c it's slow and the gain is questionable
<teythoon> it breaks mmapping the code in
<teythoon> exec/exec.c is huge (~2300 lines) and complex and it is an
  essential server
<teythoon> and I wonder if the unzipping is done securely, e. g. if it's
  not possible to crash exec with an maliciously compressed executable

IRC, freenode, #hurd, 2013-09-12

<rekado> The zip code in hurd/exec/ looks really complicated; does it
  really just unpack zipped files in memory (which could be replaced by
  library calls) or is there something else going on?
<braunr> rekado:
  http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2013-08/msg00049.html
<rekado> braunr: interesting. Thanks.
<rekado> Does this mean that the "small hack entry" on the contributing
  page to use libz and libbz2 in exec is no longer valid?
<braunr> probably

May want to have a look at using BFD / libiberty/simpleobject.

Justus: The BFD code has been removed from the exec server.