Re: RFC: on AIX, which "soname"-equivalent to prefer with runtime linking?

[Daniel Sands]

> > > The reasons to choose this way:
> > >
> > > *) It is possible to dlopen() with or without a version number:
> > >     - dlopen("libNAME.so(shr.o)", RTLD_MEMBER), besides the preferred
> > >     - dlopen("libNAME.so.1(shr.o)", RTLD_MEMBER), and even
> > >     - dlopen("libNAME.so.1.2.3(shr.o)", RTLD_MEMBER) does work.
> >
> > Does dlopen("libNAME.so", RTLD_GLOBAL|RTLD_NOW) (for example) without 
> > RTLD_MEMBER work?
>
> RTLD_MEMBER is only needed for loading an archive library.  As it implies, 
> it also requires the name of the member you want to load.  .so is the 
> format of one of those members, so it's not required in this case.
>
> There are cases where I have found this useful though.  AIX has to a small 
> degree adopted the lib64 convention, but not well enough to be useful.  So 
> with one library I built, I combined both into the same .a file, including 
> its dlopen'd libs.  So it would be nice to have Libtool support for this 
> too.
>
> However, it seems that for all of the requested functionality, it may be 
> necessary to have an AIX-specific libtool script and maybe even an 
> AIX-specific LTDL.

Apparently I need to read closer.  So the libs are named with .so, but they 
are apparently in .a format, according to the above dlopens.  In that case, 
RTLD_MEMBER is required and must include the member object name.