FreeTDS Development Group

[Steve Langasek <vorlon AT netexpress.net>]

On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, Brian Bruns wrote:

> > Is ABI compatibility with Sybase's dblib a concern?  If we're nowhere 
> > close to
> > being binary-compatible now, then I would think it's ok to redefine the 
> > name
> > of the real function symbol to 'tdsdbopen' across the board.  If we do 
> > aspire
> > to binary-compatibility, there's still a solution -- we can use ELF magic 
> > to
> > make 'dbopen' a weak symbol alias to 'tdsdbopen', in such a way that 
> > anything
> > you compile against dblib will use tdsdbopen, and the 'dbopen' name will 
> > still
> > be available for closed-source apps to use.

> Binary compatibility is not and probably will never be a goal.  Closed
> apps are probably operating against sybase anyway and it would obviously
> be on a platform that sybase supported, so no biggie if that handful of
> apps didn't work.  I can't think of any off the top of my head anyway.

Ok -- in that case, it doesn't matter what the actual library symbol is, as
long as the headers provide a mapping for 'dbopen' that lets us maintain
source compatibility.  No single source file can include both dbm and dblib
headers at the same time, but I'm not sure anyone was ever doing this?

So using the define lets us do away with the --enable option altogether.

Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer