build: Add a symbol version to all exported symbols

The --default-symver linker option attaches a default version definition
(the SONAME) to every exported symbol. It is supported since at least
GNU binutils 2.22 in 2011 (older versions not tested).

With this version definition, newly-linked binaries that depend on the
json-glib shared library will refer to its symbols in a versioned form,
preventing their references from being resolved to a symbol of the same
name exported by json-c or libjansson if those libraries appear in
dependency search order before json-glib, which will usually result in
a crash. This is necessary because ELF symbol resolution normally uses
a single flat namespace, not a tree like Windows symbol resolution.
At least one symbol (json_object_iter_next()) is exported by all three
JSON libraries.

Linking with -Bsymbolic is not enough to have this effect in all cases,
because -Bsymbolic only affects symbol lookup within a shared object,
for example when json_from_string() calls json_parser_new(). It does
not affect symbol lookup when external code calls into json-glib,
for example when libedataserver calls json_parser_new().

This change will also not prevent code that depends on json-c or
libjansson from finding json-glib's symbols and crashing; to prevent
that, a corresponding change in json-c or libjansson would be needed.

Adding a symbol-version is a backwards-compatible change, but once
added, removing or changing the symbol-version would be an incompatible
change that requires a SONAME bump.

Partially resolves https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/json-glib/-/issues/33
and https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/glib/-/issues/2147.

Signed-off-by: Simon McVittie <smcv@collabora.com>

1 files changed, 1 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/meson.build b/meson.build
index f84d865..67d2a5e 100644
--- a/meson.build
+++ b/meson.build
@@ -136,6 +136,7 @@ if host_system == 'linux'
     '-Wl,-Bsymbolic',
     '-Wl,-z,relro',
     '-Wl,-z,now',
+    '-Wl,--default-symver',
   ])
 endif