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Symbol versioning question with ld

Brian Dessent brian@dessent.net
Wed Jun 13 22:29:00 GMT 2007 
Gordon.Schumacher@seagate.com wrote:

> Might such an override be possible to add, or do I not understand
> this well enough and thus think it might be?  That would certainly

I think you underestimate what all is involved with an ABI.  It's not
just a matter of "link this symbol to this."  A function's arguments
might have changed in type or in number; types might have different
sizes, structs different layouts, and so on.  These aren't things that
the linker has any control over, so in order to produce code that links
to an older version of a library, you need the headers from that older
version installed so that the compiler sees definitions that correspond
to the symbols that the linker will use.  And there's no practical way
to have multiple versions of the same header installed, thus you can
only really link to whatever the library defines as the current version.

> Am I completely off-base?  I do not relish the concept of building
> my own libX11!

It sounds like you're making it harder than it should be.  Just install
an older distro under VMware.  (Or dual-boot with a separate partition,
or whatever.)

Brian
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