Re: tests on AIX 5

[Gary V. Vaughan]

Hi Bob, Ralf, Lurkers!

My understanding (and hence likely foundation of undocumented 
assumptions in macros, tests and ltdl code) is that we support two
configurations -- I'm using the dlopen API to represent whatever
OS loader libltdl eventually calls out to:

  i) dlopen(NULL) returns a pointer:
     this implies the return value is a system lt_dlhandle to the
     main object which can be passed to dlsym() to get the address
     of symbols from the main ``module''.
  ii) dlopen(NULL) doesn't return a pointer:
     if the application is linked with -dlopen self, we build a table
     for the preload dlloader so that lt_dlsym will still work

I think it would be good to document that this is only expected to work
if the code that uses lt_dlopen(NULL) handles for anything is part of
the application proper (i.e. not a library).

Does anybody here expect anything to behave otherwise?

We should write tests to check this too.

Cheers,
        Gary.

Bob Friesenhahn wrote:
> A test failed because libltdl failed to locate a symbol from within the 
> *main* executable.  If libltdl was executed from a shared library or 
> module, I would be quite happy if it failed to locate a symbol from 
> within the *main* executable unless the main executable was explicitly 
> loaded.  If it did locate a symbol from the main exectable, then that 
> indicates that symbols from the main executable may be polluting the 
> namespace, which could lead to wrong behavior.

--
Gary V. Vaughan      ())_.  address@hidden,gnu.org}
Research Scientist   ( '/   http://tkd.kicks-ass.net
GNU Hacker           / )=   http://www.gnu.org/software/libtool
Technical Author   `(_~)_   http://sources.redhat.com/autobook

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