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

[Jeffrey Altman]

Danny Mayer wrote:
> Jeffrey Altman wrote:
>> 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
>
> I strongly agree. While this can be problematic at times to maintain
> it's better than the alternative. This needs to be done for the 32-bit
> as well as the 64-bit libraries. I'm not clear if to you are proposing
> that, but by making it now it will avoid future incompatibilities.
>
> Danny
I am proposing making the change for 32-bit and 64-bit releases in KFW 3.2.2

Jeffrey Altman

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