[Ffmpeg-devel] Externally visible symbols without ff or av prefix

[Rich Felker]

On Sun, Nov 12, 2006 at 03:02:59AM +0100, Aurelien Jacobs wrote:
> On Sun, 12 Nov 2006 02:45:19 +0100
> Michael Niedermayer <michaelni at gmx.at> wrote:
> 
> > Hi
> > 
> > On Sat, Nov 11, 2006 at 09:32:22PM +0000, M?ns Rullg?rd wrote:
> > > There are quite a few symbols in libav* without an ff or av prefix.
> > > Should we be doing something about that?
> > 
> > for the ones which arent used outside ff* just rename them whenever
> > you want
> 
> IMO, for those one (ie. the one which are not part of public API),
> the problem is not their name, but the fact that they are visible
> externally.
> I don't think renaming them is a so good idea. Making them invisible
> seems to be a better idea (using the visibility attribute ?).

The C language does not have a "visibility attribute" because the unit
of linkage is the compilation unit, i.e. C has no such thing as a
"library" only a module (aka "compilation unit"). Using GNU/ELF/SVR4
hacks to make these systems immune to the namespace pollution problem
does not fix it. I'm actually quite angry at the GCC folks for
introducing these hacks because it means ignorant developers will use
the hacks rather than fixing namespace issues, and in turn will make
their software fail miserably on non-GNU-ish systems.

Rich