Re: dpkg-gensymbols and C++ (once again)
On Tue, 02 Feb 2010, Michael Tautschnig wrote:
> Couldn't the following be implemented, maybe as some C++ mode of dpkg-gensymbols?
> - Instead of mangled symbol names, source packages should ship demangled symbol
> files. This way, package maintainers could truly inspect those lists of
> symbols and maintain them in a sane way (like manually adding symbols as the
> API evolves). The symbol names would remain independent of the architecture
> and sorted in some logical way (i.e., by C++ namespace and class names),
> unintended symbols as part of those lists would become obvious, etc.
The next version of dpkg will support this. See
http://bugs.debian.org/563752
> - Pending realizability using g++ or the like, these lists are converted to
> their architecture-specific variants consisting of mangled names by
> dpkg-gensymbols.
Note that the mangled name is what constitutes the ABI. So when the
compiler/build environment changes the mangling, the ABI is broken even if
the package generation is able to find a new match for the demangled
symbol (this happened recently for armel with gcc 4.4).
Cheers,
--
Raphaël Hertzog
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