[Pkg-openssl-devel] Re: symbol versioning

[Johnny C. Lam]

Christoph Martin wrote:
> 
> while introducing openssl 0.9.8 in Debian we found (as expected) abi
> conflicts with version 0.9.7. The problem is that programs and libraries
> now have complex dependencies with libssl et.al . If you think for
> example of pam. Different pam modules can link to different versions of
> openssl, which will lead to segmentation faults.
> 
> The method to prevent this is symbol versioning.
> 
> Did you think about introducing this (at least for linux)?
> 
> If we do so, all the distributions should try to coordinate this work to
> have the same symbols. The goal ist to have LSB compatible libraries and
> binaries.

I think we could solve this by just properly versioning the shared 
libraries?  Currently, the shared library versions match the OpenSSL 
version number, which is completely wrong for platforms that use ELF or 
a.out linkage.  The fact that 0.9.8 and 0.9.7 have conflicting ABIs 
should imply that the shared libraries for 0.9.8 need to have a higher 
major version number than the shared libraries for 0.9.7.

	Cheers,

	-- Johnny Lam <jlam at pkgsrc.org>