[lsb-discuss] NSS: soname problems and compatibility issues

Wichmann, Mats D mats.d.wichmann at intel.com
Wed Aug 27 11:03:25 PDT 2008


> NSS uses the built in linux SO versioning scheme for this.

I think the Debian complaint stems from it not really doing this.
Normally, libraries are provided with a version suffix, and with
an soname branded into the library.  When you link against a
library, the soname is added as a requirement for the binary.
But the soname in, for example, the Fedora 9 copy of libnss3.so
is just "libnss3.so" - there's none of the usual versioning,
as in say "libc.so.6" or "libglib-2.0.so.0" (numerical suffix
serving as the versioning) - it appears to be this that Debian
decided was their policy to add.

> NSS uses .def files to control exports of symbols. Each symbol is
> tagged with the release of NSS that it was first exported. This is to
> prevent
> the compatibility issue above, however the application in question
> stripped that information. The correct fix is not to strip that
> information (which is implemented in the RH systems now).

But this is a different question - this is not library versioning,
but symbol versioning.  The LSB is using libnss3/libssl3 symbol
versioning, and once the proper library is located, it doesn't
seem we're having any problems with this part of the draft spec, it
appears to be consistently implemented.


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