Versioned symbols

[Marcus Brinkmann]

At Thu, 26 Feb 2004 16:12:17 +0100,
Ivo Timmermans wrote:
> Would it be possible to make all public symbols in the library
> versioned?  This is becoming increasingly important for Debian, with
> the growing popularity of GNUTLS as an alternative to OpenSSL.  I
> could add them to the Debian package, but I'd rather see support for
> it in your releases as well.

If you are talking about versioned symbol support a la glibc, then
that is a lot of work.

If you are talking about sticking the same version on all symbols in
the library depending on the soname of the library, then that is not
so difficult (nor is it very difficult to maintain it).  However, your
intention would then be to _load_ two versions of the library into the
same binary.  For this to be supported, it is not enough to make all
symbols versioned.  It must also be guaranteed that the two libraries
are not conflicting.

I don't know enough about libgcrypt to say if that is possible.
Potential trouble makers are signal handling, and anything that
accesses task-global state.  It's a delicate issue, but worthwhile to
look into it.  It's a delicate issue, though.

Thanks,
Marcus