[Rd] Build directory path saved in Meta/hsearch.rds

[Prof Brian Ripley]

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