This Space for Rent

New Code!

Discount has been put up to version 2.0.9 with what may count as the most trivial update I’ve ever done. After a couple of months of 2.0.8 floating around uneventfully, I got a bug report that configure.sh was unable to detect scalar sizes on what turned out to be a standard linux x86_64 platform.

Now, given that discount has been working on x86_64 for quite some time now (and I’ve actually built it up on one of them and tested it, too) this was an unexpected result, and upon further investigation I discovered that configure.sh was unable to detect scalar sizes because it couldn’t run the test program, and it couldn’t run the test program because /tmp was mounted noexec by default on whatever virtual hosting service the user was using.

*siiiiigh*

Now, the chances of my complaints changing the now-traditional Linux CADT security process are about as good as the chances of my complaints changing gcc so it’s actually a C compiler (which is to say: not at all, if I’m lucky) so instead I needed to put in another workaround to get around this feature, and I did that by having configure.sh write executables that I intended to execute directly into the working directory instead of /tmp, and that leads directly to this New Code! which may fail during configuration, but will at least fail somewhere else.