Re: Do symbols make sense for C++

[Thomas Weber <tweber@debian.org>]

On Thu, Jan 26, 2012 at 08:08:07AM +0000, Sune Vuorela wrote:
> >Am I missing some trick to make them useful?
> 
> You miss pkgkde-symbolshelper written by the fabulous Modestas Vainius
> which is available in pkg-kde-tools.
> 
> http://pkg-kde.alioth.debian.org/symbolfiles.html

I'm currently creating symbol files for Octave in Debian. And quite
frankly, the way symbol files for C++ libraries are handled and
(especially) documented is totally frustrating.

There's exactly zero precise documentation on how to maintain symbol
files there. When the topic is brought up on mailing list, people point
at some tools from the KDE packages, but still there's no documentation
on the problem itself. The best example is dpkg-gensymbols(1) itself:

[topic is the 'optional' tag]:
"For example, most of C++ template instantiations fall into this category".

Yeah, great. Which instantiations cannot be marked as optional and how
do I recognize them? And if it's actually impossible to maintain symbol
files for C++ libraries (as Florian Weimer has claimed in this thread),
why doesn't the manpage just say so?

	Thomas