It's a useful technique. We used to send out binary patches that attached themselves to the end of the afflicted executable and patched themselves into the load table.

When the executable loaded, they checked the embedded version in the 3rd party .dll that contained the bug we were working around, and if it was broken version, patched the dynamic link tables to redirect the broken API to the substitute that we had attached to the end.

When the 3rd party library was updated, the next time the executable ran, it unhooked itself from the loadtable, and became a redundant few dozen extra bytes on the end of the executable, and the program continued, now using the (hopefully fixed) API.

Of course, you wouldn't get away with this these days because every virus scanner within a million miles would scream bloody blue murder.

Such is progress.

That said. C::MM is kind of unusual as the code that needs to be patched never actually exists on disk anywhere. It jusy comes into being in memory at compile time. Kind of tricky to C&P.


Examine what is said, not who speaks.
Silence betokens consent.
Love the truth but pardon error.

In reply to Re^3: Class::MethodMaker, workplace politics, and patches by BrowserUk
in thread Class::MethodMaker, workplace politics, and patches by dragonchild

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