ELF extension for starting symbol search from module dependencies

[Jakub Jelinek]

On Thu, Aug 22, 2002 at 10:35:33AM +0200, Maciej W. Rozycki wrote:
> On 21 Aug 2002, Luca Barbieri wrote:
> 
> > This is a proposal (including patches) for a GNU extension to the ELF
> > executable format that adds a flag that causes the dynamic loader to
> > start searching for symbols referenced by modules with the flag set from
> > the module itself and its immediate dependencies. If the symbol is not
> > found in this way, the dynamic linker continues the search as usual. 
> > 
> > This extension would be useful to allow to load in the same address
> > space multiple libraries that define identical symbols, that would be
> > used by different modules possibly unaware of each other's use of such
> > symbols. 
> 
>  Hmm, what if two functions which get imported from different versions of
> the same library operate on a static (private to the library) variable
> that is needed for a proper operation for some reason?  You'd better
> rebuild the sources to use a single version of each library instead. 

Or, even better, introduce symbol versioning for libpng.so and maintain it
ABI compatible from this point on...

	Jakub