Special symbol version for glibc's internal interfaces

[Andreas Jaeger]

Karl Runge and David Brown propose in [1] following their experience
with Solaris, to add a special symbol version for glibc's internal
implementation interface, e.g. GLIBC_PRIVATE.

For example, debug/Versions contains currently:
    # functions used in other libraries
    __backtrace; __backtrace_symbols; __backtrace_symbols_fd;

Hiding those symbols with GLIBC_PRIVATE would make it explicit that
those are internal interfaces.

Why didn't we follow this at first when adding symbol versioning to
glibc?  What do other think about this?

Andreas

Footnotes: 
[1]  The paper is available as HTML and PDF at
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/als2000/full_papers/browndavid/browndavid_html/index.html
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/als2000/full_papers/browndavid/browndavid.pdf

-- 
 Andreas Jaeger
  SuSE Labs aj@suse.de
   private aj@arthur.inka.de
    http://www.suse.de/~aj