On Mon, Nov 16, 2009 at 03:01:03PM +0300, Damir Shayhutdinov wrote:
> > On the other hand, we can simply assume that symbols should not be moved
> > across the libraries.  The worst thing that can happen then (if a symbol
> > does move) is that we need to rebuild a bunch of packages, only to
> > relink their binaries and update dependencies.

Do we care about binary-only apps which we cannot rebuild - would
their repackaging in the RPM form become impossible?

> Have you thought about C++ libraries and their mangling? And the fact
> that many of C++ exported symbols in such libraries are not, in fact,
> the part of the API, they are only exported because C++ cannot control
> their visibility on the ELF symbol level. I'm talking about private
> methods of classes.

Private methods can still be part of the public ABI - e.g., if a
public inline calls a private non-inline method, the resulting
executable will have a reference to the "private" symbol.

C++ libraries have yet another property which is unusual for C
libraries - they typically use weak symbols.