Re: [Gábor Gombás] Bug#564566: libkadm5clnt7: SONAME conflict with Heimdal

[Jeffrey Hutzelman]

--On Monday, January 11, 2010 11:01:26 AM -0800 Philip Guenther 
<guenther at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jan 11, 2010 at 6:54 AM, Jeffrey Hutzelman <jhutz at cmu.edu> wrote:
> ...
>> Perhaps more importantly, while these libraries have similar names, they
>> don't have identical ABI's, and they don't speak even remotely the same
>> protocol.  If one needs to be able to perform administrative operations
>> on both Heimdal and MIT KDC's, one needs both libraries.
>
> Do the libraries have identical APIs?  If not, then IMO they shouldn't
> have even the same base name (i.e., what is passed with the compiler
> -l option).  libkadm5mit_clnt.so anyone?
>
> If they have the same API but different ABIs (structure sizes or
> layouts?) then including mit or heimdal in the SONAME seems like a
> sufficient solution.

They have substantially similar API's, with differences no larger than 
might be expected as a result of evolution over time or with different 
implementations of other libraries (e.g. libc).  Certainly the differences 
are not worse than with libkrb5 itself, which may also have this problem 
someday.

-- Jeff