Special symbol version for glibc's internal interfaces

[Daniel Jacobowitz]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 04:30:15PM +0200, Jakub Jelinek wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 28, 2001 at 04:09:56PM +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:
> > Have a look at the following RPM output:
> > $ rpm -q --requires bash
> > /bin/sh  
> > ld-linux.so.2  
> > libc.so.6  
> > libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.0)  
> > libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.1)  
> > libc.so.6(GLIBC_2.2)  
> > libdl.so.2  
> > libdl.so.2(GLIBC_2.0)  
> > libdl.so.2(GLIBC_2.1)  
> > libhistory.so.4  
> > libncurses.so.5  
> > libreadline.so.4  
> 
> Further more, glibc rpm can be packaged so that it explicitely does not
> provide *(GLIBC_PRIVATE) symbol versions. This way if somebody built an rpm
> containing stuff against private interfaces, he could not install it
> without noticing.
> 
> I think GLIBC_PRIV is a good idea.

Once again, I assume I'm missing something obvious, and I'd appreciate
it if someone would enlighten me - why are any such symbols exported? 
For pthreads/ld.so?

-- 
Daniel Jacobowitz                           Carnegie Mellon University
MontaVista Software                         Debian GNU/Linux Developer