[lsb-discuss] lsb dynamic linker name for LSB 4.0

Wichmann, Mats D mats.d.wichmann at intel.com
Wed Sep 10 09:25:21 PDT 2008


I brought this one up at the end of today's call, so
I got the action of forwarding it here...

In the past, major LSB version transitions indicate
potential incompatibilities, and we've bumped the
version on the LSB linker name accordingly. If we
followed that trend, the linker for LSB 4.0 would
be ld-lsb-<arch>.so.4

I know there's sentiment for not making the change
this time; on the technical side there doesn't
seem to be any huge change that might require this
kind of coarse-grained identification: really, what
changing the .so version means is that the system
can, on execution of a binary, immediately identify
the difference between LSB 3.x and LSB 4.x, and be
able to take different steps.  We've uplifted glibc,
but the difference is handled by normal symbol versioning
mechanisms and should be no problem for most cases.
An example of where the linker change  might be needed
would be if a system natively running a pre-2.4
glibc wanted to be LSB 4 conforming; LSB 3.x binaries
might run just fine and that linker could be a symlink
to the Linux linker; meanwhile the LSB 4 linker could
fiddle the library search path so that a special
2.4 glibc for running LSB 4 binaries is found.

The LSB linker exists to allow the *possibility* of
such fiddling; what we might discuss is whether the chance
of a need for that will be so remote for this release that
it's better to leave the linker version alone - leaving
it alone will make for a smoother transition with less
impacts.  We *think* every distribution that's likely
to want to support LSB 4 is already at glibc 2.4 or greater,
but that may be an erroneous assumption, so it's better
to ask.

Note that with LSB 4, conforming systems will be
required to support LSB 3 applications as well;
this has not been the case for past LSB versions.
It would be good to hear if this requirement might
be easier to meet if the linker version were bumped.





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