[klibc] Rationale for hashed .so?

[H. Peter Anvin]

Aaron Griffin wrote:
> I'm curious, and perhaps a bit naive about this stuff.  I'd like to
> know the reason for having a klibc-$HASH.so version which the shared
> apps are linked against.  It makes it less simple to build a static
> initramfs file list to use.
> Currently, one has to read the libc.so.hash file to build the
> filename, something that can't be done in a file list passed to
> gen_init_cpio unless it's done in some sort of script.
> 
> Could you explain the reason for this?  Is it possible to get rid of
> this hash to make it easier to work with?

The reason for this is to make sure the hash matches the klibc that a 
binary was built with, and, if necessary, to allow more than one of them 
to co-exist.

The right way to fix that is almost certainly to allow gen_hash_cpio to 
accept wildcards; there are some other very good reasons to do so.

	-hpa