Re: Third call for votes for the debian project leader election 2006
Scripsit Jeroen van Wolffelaar <jeroen@wolffelaar.nl>
>> > I3. What is the -Bsymbolic ld flag, exactly what does it do, and
>> > how that differs from library symbol versioning? What problems do
>> > -Bsymbolic linking solve? Why is libc6 not compiled with -Bsymbolic?
> I've never maintained a C library, though I did agree to help a little
> bit on some C++ library recently. I don't expect I'll go looking up what
> -Bsymbolic means even now.
> Is this question useless? I don't know. Apparantly, it didn't help me in
> any way.
I'm not so sure. Remembering that this is the exact spelling of the
option that frobnitzes the thingamajib is pretty useless, I agree.
(For the record, I remember that the hardest part of this question was
thinking up a way in which -Bsymbolic could conceivably be said to be
_similar_ to symbol versioning ...)
But simply through the process of once having been able to answer
these question you get some latent background knowledge of how symbols
are handled in ELF shared libaries and how the abstraction works, and
I think that background knowledge is valuable. Symbol-name mistakes
can cause pretty tricky interaction bugs, and it's not too farfetched
that maintainers of packages that _use_ libraries will sometimes need
some basic knowledge about which kind of things the dynamic linker
does.
I'm not saying that this is _necessarily_ something EVERY
package-maintaining developer has to know (especially given how much
of Debian actually happens in scripting languages anyway these days),
but it is not as completely specialized as you appear to imply.
--
Henning Makholm "Oh, hvilken kok detilig!"
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