Re: weak handling

["H . J . Lu" <hjl at lucon dot org>]

On Wed, Jun 07, 2000 at 08:08:12PM -0700, Ulrich Drepper wrote:
> I just checked in a patch which brings the handling of weak
> definitions at runtime in line with the official[*] ELF
> interpretation.  That is weak symbol definitions are treated like
> normal definitions during dynamic linking.  The weak attribute is only
> used in the static linker (and for references).
> 
> This came up some time ago during the ELF discussions HJ and I are
> participating in.  I cannot think of a program which would have
> problems because of this change.  In case there is one the user can
> switch back to the old behaviour by having LD_DYNAMIC_WEAK in the
> environment.
> 
> The reason I've made this change is not really to be more conformant
> (it's nice but no reason since nobody complained about the old
> behaviour).  The real reason is that some more features (like lazy
> loading) depend on this interpretation of weak definitions.
> 
> If you have or see problems with this let me know.

I could be wrong. What will happen to those libc symbols defined in
the dynamic linker used for bootstrap? I thought those symbols were
weak in ld.so and would be overridden by the strong ones in libc.so.


H.J.