Re: [PATCH] fwrite: silence __wur without using inline

[Paul Eggert]

On 01/03/2013 01:00 PM, Eric Blake wrote:

> in the case libvirt was hitting, multiple files used fwrite,
> which in turn meant multiple linkable entries for rpl_fwrite were
> emitted when linking things together; but because they weren't marked
> 'static', the linker didn't like us.

OK, but surely this problem would happen with any extern symbol
that gnulib defines.  I.e., it's not a problem specific to
extern inline functions; it's a problem with externs in general.

Isn't the "right" way to handle this, from the gnulib point of view,
the lib-symbol-visibility module?  Shouldn't libvirt be using that?
If libvirt was compiled with -fvisibility=hidden then any miscellanous
extern functions that it defined would be local to the libvirt .so,
and wouldn't clash with similarly-named functions in other shared objects.

> what we
> did for fwrite (avoid inline altogether, and instead use GNU C instead
> of Standard C, to get the workaround we wanted) is really all the best
> we can do

I hope that's not the case, because it pretty much means
that there's no portable way to use inline functions in
gnulib headers that contribute to shared objects.