How do I statically link against two versions of xerces-c (or any library for that matter)?

Question

I know this is not a very clean thing to do but how do I do it nonetheless?

Basically, I am statically linking a third party library that uses xerces-c 2.7 and I want to use xerces-c 3.1 (for some of the newer latest and greatest features not really available in 2.x)

The modules that use 2.7 (used internally by the third party library and never exposed to my code) have nothing in common with the modules using 3.1 (in my code).

Any way how to do this? I know it's not a good thing but I shudder to think of the lead time between submitting an upgrade request for the library and actually getting it done. Probably months at least and I don't want to go down that unholy path.

A generic compiler independent solution would ofc be much better.

I came into this problem sometime ago with a different library (libpng). If you are using linux or similar, try looking at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8535330/linking-libraries-with-incompatible-dependecies — Alessandro Pezzato, May 30 '12 at 15:34
That's the same problem I'm having. But the solution talks of c only. Any idea if it would work for c++? — owagh, May 30 '12 at 15:43

score 0 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:11

Another solution aside from that mentioned in " Linking libraries with incompatible dependecies " is to isolate the different versions by building them into different dynamic libraries. The simplest approach may be to move the code that uses xerces 3.1 into a new dynamic library, and create an interface to it. Since you're statically linking against Xerces, this will keep the references internal to the dynamic library. You may need to change the gcc visibility settings to ensure that only selected function names are exported from the dynamic library.

How do I statically link against two versions of xerces-c (or any library for that matter)?

1 Answers1