Help needed?

[lkollar]

The auditwheel project is a prominent user of patchelf and we have identified several bugs in patchelf in the past which impacts (or impacted in the past) the project. patchelf seems to move fairly slow which means that we have to resort to workarounds while waiting for bug fixes to be merged and released -- in the past we've shipped a custom build of patchelf in the manylinux images or applied workarounds in auditwheel in the code until it's fixed in patchelf (#94).

We started discussing options to improve the situation. One thing we could do is to help out maintaining patchelf. If we can get issues fixed and patches landed quicker and do releases more frequently it could benefit both projects. I am happy to volunteer helping out and there might be more @pypa folks who are interested in chipping in.

If there are other ways you think we can help out with patchelf, please let us know.

[probonopd]

patchelf seems to move fairly slow which means that we have to resort to workarounds while waiting for bug fixes to be merged and released -- in the past we've shipped a custom build of patchelf

Same here, awaiting a fix for #124 since 2 years. Would be great if you could help to bring this tool up to speed 👍

[edolstra]

Thanks! It would definitely be good to have more maintainers for patchelf, since I have little time for it myself at the moment.

[dasJ]

So what about this? I'd really love to see some development on this project

[lkollar]

I've been busy with some other stuff, but I'm planning to have a look at the test suite and improve it so that the existing bug reports can be reproduced and we can avoid regressions in the future. Hopefully by having a more robust test suite we can simplify contributions and speed things up a bit.

[lkollar]

As a quick experiment I replaced the patchelf code in auditwheel with LIEF and it works perfectly for my use case, so while I'm still interested in helping out, given that it's a lot less work to simply integrate LIEF into the code base and I can use the extra time on auditwheel itself, I won't be able to dedicate as much time to patchelf as I hoped to.

Given that there seems to be interest in getting more maintainers I think it would be useful to put out a call on mailing lists and other channels to get more attention on the issue.

[probonopd]

LIEF

Thanks for the hint.
In case someone wonders what LIEF is: https://lief.quarkslab.com/doc/latest/Intro.html

[domenkozar]

See #199