What can be done with these exploits and what should Puppy be doing?
Dunno. Within the 238 separate modules in the gnome build sequence there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of these "invalid conversions," though, I noticed, the number was decreasing every time I built gnome (about eight times; it takes a week each time)...I presume because jhbuild is constantly comparing the local codebase with fresh source from git, and knowledge of proper coding practice for gcc-4.4+libc.so.6-2.10 is still steadily percolating into the individual coding repertoires of the gnome-module developer community. I was not watching the make on every single module for instances of an invalid conversion, because, on most of the modules, the compile breezes right through. On a few, -Werror is set, so the compile halts, but on most of
these, manually editing the makefile to remove the -Werror switch is all it takes to get the compile to finish.
The first module in the gnome build sequence on which removing -Werror does not work to get the compile to succeed, is perl-net-dbus, followed in rapid succession by a cluster of non-finishers. This roadblock was what goaded me to google around, and presently chance upon the two posts linked above.
But it's really over my head at this point. Are all these instances of "invalid conversion" just innocent mistakes, i.e. never ascribe to Tonya Harding what is sufficiently explained by Lindsey Lohan, or is gnome in reality a hidden-in-plain-sight spooks' banquet of backdoor invocation opportunities? To answer that question, one would need to trace back every instance of a wrongly-returned constant type. Something which I am not quite qualified for, nor do I have the time.
The author of the second post cited above, probably knows the answer. The author of the 20100211 lookaside cache patch-set to Fedora gcc-4.4.3, probably could tell you, too. And probably a thousand others.
Not being so expert, I exercize caution. I don't Facebook, I don't Twitter, I only rarely Skype, I bank face-to-face with a live banker at my local credit union. Except for purchasing gasoline I do not use credit cards, only debit, and keep the account balances small. I keep my shrine to Bellatrix LeStrange, my Paul McCartney brownie recipes, and that map I won at poker from Mel Fisher, all on encrypted sticks. My addresses, passwords, and phone numbers are all still in a leather-bound pocket notebook given me by my grandma, thirty-eight years ago.