That hasn't been needed since since commit 6068d3f, which changed that code to
check an env var instead ("_JSON_C_STRERROR_ENABLE").
Fixes issue #812, about dup symbols in static builds with clang.
With this version script, newly-linked binaries that depend on the
json-c shared library will refer to its symbols in a versioned form,
preventing their references from being resolved to a symbol of the same
name exported by json-glib or libjansson if those libraries appear in
dependency search order before json-c, which will usually result in
a crash. This is necessary because ELF symbol resolution normally uses
a single flat namespace, not a tree like Windows symbol resolution.
At least one symbol (json_object_iter_next()) is exported by all three
JSON libraries.
Linking with -Bsymbolic is not enough to have this effect in all cases,
because -Bsymbolic only affects symbol lookup within a shared object,
for example when json_object_set_serializer() calls
json_object_set_userdata(). It does not affect calls from external
code into json-c, unless json-c was statically linked into the
external caller.
This change will also not prevent code that depends on json-glib or
libjansson from finding json-c's symbols and crashing; to prevent
that, a corresponding change in json-glib or libjansson would be needed.
Adding a symbol-version is a backwards-compatible change, but once
added, removing or changing the symbol-version on a symbol would be an
incompatible change that requires a SONAME bump.
Resolves: https://github.com/json-c/json-c/issues/621
(when combined with an equivalent change to libjansson).
Signed-off-by: Simon McVittie <smcv@collabora.com>
Eric Haszlakiewicz
Simon McVittie