Dynamic Module Portability

[Joseph Spencer]

I'm looking to create a portable binary, and from everything I can read, it
is almost impossible.  The recommended approach seems to be to expose
source code and require users to compile.  This is painful because it
requires the source code and gcc to be available: a hard sell for the lazy
sysadmin.

My goal is to create a proprietary module that is used in conjunction with
a paid service.  Users simply install the module and provide access token
credentials.

As you can imagine it's been really difficult, mainly because practically
*every* configure option is compared at run time.

I added some logging, and found that the module signature is indeed
embedded in the resulting .so file.  I was able to successfully use sed to
get my module to work, but I'm thinking this is an obvious hack not even
worth considering for a production binary:

sed -i''
's|8,4,8,0011111111010111001111111111111111|8,4,8,0000111111010111001110101111000110|'
ngx_my_custom_module-nginx-1.11.5.so

Having nginx -V is nice, but it could be beneficial to
expose NGX_MODULE_SIGNATURE somehow.  That way I could have an installer
script that checkes to ensure that essential modules are available and
modify the binary after it's been downloaded.  I realize this is dangerous,
but I'm not willing to expose source code and require gcc yet.

Any opinions or guidance would be greatly appreciated.

-- 
Thanks,
Joe Spencer (member)
Kogo Software LLC
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