Re: RFC: Support for unstable ABIs

[Ralf Wildenhues]

Hello Simon,

Apologies for the delay.

* Simon Richter wrote on Tue, Jul 11, 2006 at 03:57:36PM CEST:
> 
> a lot of projects that are just starting out still make quite a lot of
> changes to their library ABI, so it does not make full sense to build a
> shared library right away, but sometimes it is still necessary to have
> PIC code around, for example when building a plugin to be dlopen()ed by
> some program. If said library and the plugin code also live in separate
> packages, you have a bit of a problem with current libtool.

For one, using -avoid-version would be a good idea in this case.

> The idea at this point would be to add another switch "-unstable-abi",
> which would make libtool generate an archive instead of a shared library
> (as it would for a convenience library), but also install both variants
> (perhaps as libfoo.a and libfoo_pic.a). Shared object links against that
> library would then simply include the ..._pic.a file on the linker
> command line.

Well, but that way you break the dependency algorithm, at least the way
it works currently: you run into possibly duplicated symbols.  This is
bad when it breaks with a link failure, but it's worse when all you get
is a silent failure: For example, you may now have two instances of some
file-scope static counter...

I don't see an easy portable solution to the problem.

Cheers,
Ralf