build: Add a symbol version to all exported symbols
The --default-symver
linker option attaches a default version definition
(the SONAME) to every exported symbol. It is supported since at least
GNU binutils 2.22 in 2011 (older versions not tested).
With this version definition, newly-linked binaries that depend on the
json-glib 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-c or libjansson if those libraries appear in
dependency search order before json-glib, 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_from_string() calls json_parser_new(). It does not affect symbol lookup when external code calls into json-glib, for example when libedataserver calls json_parser_new().
This change will also not prevent code that depends on json-c or libjansson from finding json-glib's symbols and crashing; to prevent that, a corresponding change in json-c or libjansson would be needed.
Adding a symbol-version is a backwards-compatible change, but once added, removing or changing the symbol-version would be an incompatible change that requires a SONAME bump.
Partially resolves #33 (closed) and glib#2147 (closed).