Re: [RFC][PATCH] libselinux: Namespacing

[James Antill <jantill@redhat.com>]

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On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 16:12 -0400, Stephen Smalley wrote:
> libselinux presently lacks proper namespacing of its functions.  This
> patch is just for comment on an approach to gradually fixing that
> problem, starting with just a trivial example for a single function.
> The idea is to switch over the real function to being properly
> namespaced, provide an alias under the old name in the symbol table for
> binary compatibility, and make the old name a macro in the public
> headers that expands to the new name so that source rebuilds against the
> new library will start using the new name.  Then at some point in the
> future, we drop the old name macro from the source API, forcing an
> update to external sources to build against newer headers, while leaving
> the alias present in the symbol table as long as we need compatibility
> with existing binaries.  Thoughts?

 The one thing I'd suggest is having some kind of compiler switch we can
use before we turn it off. For instance something like...


#ifndef SELINUX_COMPAT_API
#define SELINUX_COMPAT_API 1
#endif

#if SELINUX_COMPAT_API

/* ... */
#define freecon(x) selinux_freecon(x)
#endif

...then we can move certain packages over immediately, and do "#define
SELINUX_COMPAT_API 0" in them ... and also change the default at some
point, but allow people to still access the compat. macros for a short
time.

 Also we really want to have some perl/whatever that goes through the
public API looking for symbols ... so we only have to do it once.

-- 
James Antill <jantill@redhat.com>

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