Symbol Visibility [was: Proposed changes to the current sdk]

[Paulo César Pereira de Andrade]

  Replying myself...

>   I changed it to export all sdk symbols to not give people a reason
> to compile the X Server with --disable-visibility  :-)
>
>   But there are plenty of symbols that shouldn't really be made
> available to modules. While there are others that are so widely
> used that now they must be made available. There are also other
> symbols that were already exported, but not used by any module.
>
>   Since several of them are in the sdk "by accident", I am considering
> to create some private files, that aren't installed in the sdk.
> Sample pseudo "actions" for os.h:
>  o copy os.h to osP.h
>  o change all files that include os.h to include osP.h
>  o change osP.h to include os.h
>  o edit os.h to only export what really should be available to
>    modules (i.e. external shared objects)
>
>   The only special case should be symbols that would still be made
> visible because they are required by modules built in the X Server
> tree, but would not be made available publicly to "external"
> modules, and there would not exist the requirement of having them
> always available.

  I don't want to break things, neither make it too difficult to
merge branches, etc, so, 'after some meditation', I come with what
I believe is the better approach to have it easily manageable,
and with the smallest chances of having it rotting in a short
time frame.
  What I plan to do is:
o Only use _X_EXPORT in header files, for the symbols that must be
  made available.
o C files should use only _X_INTERNAL for the cases where a symbol
  must really be made private, and the X Server may not be compiled
  with hidden symbols. This means a big
  "s/_X_EXPORT // `find . -name \*.c`" in the X Server tree (but
  of course checking one by one).
o Remove hw/xfree86/loader/*sym.c, as it is not mean't for use with
  the "dlloader", and currently it was pretty much only useful to
  force the compiler to not inline functions (as it just created a
  vector with symbol addresses).

  The only requirement to have a symbol exported would be to add
the _X_EXPORT in the header file, and have the C source with the
definition include that header. This should have the least impact
for developers, and be easy to maintain and keep up to date.

  I plan to do it tonight, so, if you have something agains't,
say it before I push the changes, or ...

Thanks,
Paulo