Proposal for the assignment of fixed ordinals to exported functions in kfw dlls

[Jeffrey Altman]

The KFW libraries do not have ordinals that are fixed to specific values
via assignment in the .DEF file.  This is the result of conflicts which
occurred when various forks of the code base in the late 90s resulted in
different binary distributions assigning different ordinal values to the
same function or different functions to the same ordinal value.  As a
result applications which were linked against one distribution and then
run with the libraries from another distribution would often crash.

In response all of the ordinal assignments were removed in order to get
rid of the expectation that ordinals would remain fixed from release to
release.

It has been almost a decade since then and the number of forked
distributions has decreased dramatically.  In addition we are preparing
to support 64-bit Windows, a platform on which there has never been any
forking.  As a result, we intend to assign fixed ordinal values again.

My proposal for generating the ordinal values to use for assignment is
to execute "dumpbin /export" against a pre-beta KFW 3.2.2 distribution
and hard code the assigned ordinal values into each of the .DEF files.

Does this seem reasonable?

Are there any objections to the assignment of static ordinal values in
32-bit KFW?

Jeffrey Altman

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3355 bytes
Desc: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
Url : http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/kfwdev/attachments/20070928/92728b8a/attachment.bin