[doc/README.dev] Added information about symbol checking.

git-svn-id: svn://scm.gforge.inria.fr/svn/mpfr/trunk@12126 280ebfd0-de03-0410-8827-d642c229c3f4

1 files changed, 12 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/doc/README.dev b/doc/README.dev
index a50299b08..cf3741441 100644
--- a/doc/README.dev
+++ b/doc/README.dev
@@ -341,6 +341,8 @@ To make a release (for the MPFR team):
          or --enable-gmp-internals has been used);
        * [make check-exported-symbols]
          MPFR does not define symbols with a GMP reserved prefix.
+     But note that these rules are not really portable: they may do
+     nothing or might even incorrectly fail on some platforms.
 
   7) For the release itself (not the release candidates), if no problems
      have been found, create a tag with:
@@ -1514,6 +1516,10 @@ build can be obtained as follows:
 
   nm -u src/.libs/libmpfr.so | sed -n 's/^ *U \(__gmp.*\)/\1/p'
 
+at least under Linux, the library name and the "nm" behavior being
+non-portable (adding the POSIX "-P" option may help, but there are
+still differences between platforms).
+
 Note that this list may depend on various parameters, such as the
 architecture and the compilation options.
 
@@ -1532,6 +1538,12 @@ done
 
 A similar check can be done with "make check-gmp-symbols".
 
+One can also check that MPFR does not define exported symbols with a
+prefix outside "mpfr_" and "__gmpfr_" by using "nm -g" and filtering
+at least the "U" lines. But this can only be a manual check to avoid
+false positives. Checking that a GMP reserved prefix is not used can
+be done automatically, as with "make check-exported-symbols".
+
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 To update the FAQ, checkout the misc directory of the repository root.