On 04/22/2016 04:09 PM, Yury Gribov wrote:
On 04/22/2016 05:51 PM, Pedro Alves wrote:
I think the visibility patches raise a question that should
be considered:
Does readline still want to keep these historical "rl_" symbols,
even those that we hadn't found any program is using (at
least yet) ?
Because I think that if we hide them with private visibility,
then that effectively is the same thing as removing them
for dynamic links. However, if we don't remove them, then we
end up with the inconsistency where a link with dynamic
libreadline.so fails, while a link with static libreadline.a succeeds.
It seems to me that readline should either:
- completely delete old undocumented backwards compatibility symbols,
or,
- mark them public.
Leaving them defined, but marked private leads to the dynamic
vs static inconsistency mentioned above.
I'm afraid this inconsistency is inevitable. Static libs are mere
archives and do not have any mechanism for visibility control. They'll
always be leaking internal symbols and there is not workaround for that
(well, except for marking symbols static or removing them alltogether
which is obviously not always possible).
That's my point -- the inconsistency _is not_ inevitable -- if we're
making them private, them programs won't be able to use them anyway, so
might as well remove them altogether. Or at least rename them
to "_rl_" prefix.