Re: dlopen() without RTLD_GLOBAL

[Tim Janik <timj gtk org>]

On 2 May 2002, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> gdk-pixbuf and the like should definitely not be using RTLD_GLOBAL, 
> on platforms that support dlopen() with private symbols.
> Using RTLD_GLOBAL has the effect of stuffing all those image libs into
> our ABI, which kind of sucks.
> 
> If we're doing a GLib 2.2, suggest that we add a
> G_MODULE_LOCAL_SYMBOLS flag to GModuleFlags.

one of the reasons to not have such a flag in the initial implementation
was that not all systems do support user defined scope specification.
gmodule-dl.c has more comments on this, and configure.in checks for
RTLD_GLOBAL borkeness on at least OSF1/5.0.
(the same holds for G_MODULE_BIND_LAZY, but isn't as much of a problem
since lazy resolution of symbols is more of a hint and doesn't necessarily
break things if not honoured).

the demand to load modules with non-global symbols has popped up often
enough to justify it's implementations though, but users (docs) need to
be aware that G_MODULE_BIND_LOCAL (that's the flag name we should actually
use) isn't correctly honoured on all systems.

> 
> Havoc
> 

---
ciaoTJ