Re: obsoleting shlibs - what's the plan

[David Holland <dholland-tech%netbsd.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 12:59:20PM -0400, der Mouse wrote:
 > > [...]
 > > Running the app will now load both kerberos libraries.  [...]
 > > [...], because the ELF dynamic linker binds only by symbol name, and
 > > it doesn't notice duplicates.
 > 
 > Seems to me that each of these is a bug that should be fixed (one, that
 > the dynamic linker is willing to load the same library in multiple
 > major versions; two, that multiply-defined symbols are silently
 > resolved randomly to one or the other definition).

ELF doesn't know about major versions; it only knows about sonames,
which are strings. It is only by convention that these strings end in
what we are pleased to call a major version number.

It's also not clear that loading two instances of the "same" library
is necessary wrong in all cases. For example, a library that provided
the functions in <string.h> could be cloned fairly safely, whereas two
different mallocs is clearly a losing proposition no matter what you
do.

But in general, yes, these are both bugs.

-- 
David A. Holland
dholland%netbsd.org@localhost