How is an application supposed to know if a Kerberos library isthread safe?

[Nicolas Williams]

On Wed, Dec 15, 2004 at 12:08:40PM -0500, Jeffrey Altman wrote:
> Now that we have thread safety in Kerberos 5, applications must decide 
> whether or not to use their own application level locking around calls 
> to the Kerberos 5 libraries.
> 
> If I am compiling against a specific set of headers I can test for 
> things that appeared for the first time in 1.4 to determine whether
> or not to assume the application level locks are not required.
> 
> If I am an application supposedly compiled against a fixed ABI,
> how am I supposed to know whether or not thread safety is there?
> 
> On Windows, should I probe the module which has been loaded and
> test the file version number?  Or do we want to provide some other
> exported symbol within the library itself?
> 
> How are applications on Unix supposed to be able to determine the
> existence of thread safety at runtime?

If the runtime linker is any good you could use a weak symbol for this
-- if it's value is NULL you don't have thread safety, else you do.

Else you can use the same approach as you mention for Windows (probe the
shared object).