Scripsit Jeroen van Wolffelaar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> >> > I3. What is the -Bsymbolic ld flag, exactly what does it do, and >> > how that differs from library symbol versioning? What problems do >> > -Bsymbolic linking solve? Why is libc6 not compiled with -Bsymbolic?
> I've never maintained a C library, though I did agree to help a little > bit on some C++ library recently. I don't expect I'll go looking up what > -Bsymbolic means even now. > Is this question useless? I don't know. Apparantly, it didn't help me in > any way. I'm not so sure. Remembering that this is the exact spelling of the option that frobnitzes the thingamajib is pretty useless, I agree. (For the record, I remember that the hardest part of this question was thinking up a way in which -Bsymbolic could conceivably be said to be _similar_ to symbol versioning ...) But simply through the process of once having been able to answer these question you get some latent background knowledge of how symbols are handled in ELF shared libaries and how the abstraction works, and I think that background knowledge is valuable. Symbol-name mistakes can cause pretty tricky interaction bugs, and it's not too farfetched that maintainers of packages that _use_ libraries will sometimes need some basic knowledge about which kind of things the dynamic linker does. I'm not saying that this is _necessarily_ something EVERY package-maintaining developer has to know (especially given how much of Debian actually happens in scripting languages anyway these days), but it is not as completely specialized as you appear to imply. -- Henning Makholm "Oh, hvilken kok detilig!" -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
