Re: control of symbols exported by shared libraries

[Bruno Haible]

Simon Josefsson wrote:
> > gcc-4.0 now provides support for controlling the set of symbols exported
> > from a shared library in a reasonable, maintainable way. I have added a
> > gnulib module to this effect. With documentation, this time :-)
>
> How does this relate to something like Libtool's -export-symbols-regex
> '^(idn|pr29_|punycode_|stringprep|tld_).*'?  That is what I have been
> using to control which symbols are exported or not.

According to Ulrich Drepper's paper, 
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/dsohowto.pdf,
section 2.2.6, this libtool option is just a placebo - if libtool hasn't changed
since Ulrich looked at it. Can you let us know, by showing the output of
"nm --dynamic libidn.so"?

> Your module look somewhat gcc-specific, whereas, in theory, libtool
> might work with other compilers too.

Do you know of other compilers than GCC 4 and MSVC that support the equivalent
of "-fvisibility=hidden"?

Bruno