On Fri, 2007-05-11 at 08:37 -0400, Stephen Smalley wrote:
> On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 16:31 -0400, Karl MacMillan wrote:
> > On Thu, 2007-05-10 at 16:12 -0400, Stephen Smalley wrote:
> > > libselinux presently lacks proper namespacing of its functions. This
> > > patch is just for comment on an approach to gradually fixing that
> > > problem, starting with just a trivial example for a single function.
> > > The idea is to switch over the real function to being properly
> > > namespaced, provide an alias under the old name in the symbol table for
> > > binary compatibility, and make the old name a macro in the public
> > > headers that expands to the new name so that source rebuilds against the
> > > new library will start using the new name. Then at some point in the
> > > future, we drop the old name macro from the source API, forcing an
> > > update to external sources to build against newer headers, while leaving
> > > the alias present in the symbol table as long as we need compatibility
> > > with existing binaries. Thoughts?
> > >
> >
> > Sounds good to me - will this impact the python bindings? If we do have
> > to change the bindings we should take as an opportunity to fix the
> > namespace issues there. For example, bo reason to have
> > selinux.selinux_booleans_path - should be changed to
> > selinux.booleans_path.
>
> Yes, it would affect the python bindings too; not sure what needs to be
> done there for backward compatibility.
>

Shouldn't be hard to provide the backwards compatibility - either through swig or a pure python module.

> We also have to decide what to do about functions that already have
> their own prefix, like the security_ functions and the avc_ functions;
> I'm inclined to leave those alone as already being adequately
> namespaced.
>

I'd vote for changing them. The consistency is nice in general (I'm not certain that it is obvious enough to everyone which prefix applies to which function) and it will make wrapping in languages that support proper namespacing simpler.

Karl

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