St. George really needs to update their webpay client library for Linux

My development environment is CentOS 5. Running a library that is two and a half years old really sucks on a new Linux box, especially because I had to install three compat libraries.

The software is called “webpay”, and the actual library itself is distributed as a binary library; which would be alright apart from the fact that this is a library that is meant to financial transactions, and I want to be able to trust that this library is the actual library that I am meant to use. When you go to download the file from St. George, there is no way to validate the file, no signed GPG files – not even an sha1sum.

What was even worse, is that the webpay client refused to work in the Virtuozzo container.

rt_sigaction(SIGPROF, {0x81c0ce0, [PROF], SA_RESTORER|SA_RESTART, 0xf09dc8}, {SIG_DFL}, 8) = 0
rt_sigprocmask(SIG_UNBLOCK, [PROF], NULL, 8) = 0
open("test.blue", O_RDONLY)              = 3
fstat64(3, {st_mode=S_IFREG|0777, st_size=4891, ...}) = 0
mmap2(NULL, 4096, PROT_READ|PROT_WRITE, MAP_PRIVATE|MAP_ANONYMOUS, -1, 0) = 0xb7eb3000
read(3, "", 4096)                       = 0
brk(0x9ae9000)                          = 0x9ae9000

I would like it if it “just worked”, or even better – that libwebpayclient.so came with source, so we could actually compile the library ourselves, and debug the problem further. Even though the library is from a bank, I would have no problem sending back improved code to the bank, especially if it improved the way that my software worked.

Damn banks.

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