Avoiding duplicate symbols when linking a library multiple times

Code
1

This may be a silly question, but here it goes.

I have a library (call it myLib) that depends on yaml as well as another third-party library, libA, which internally builds a version of yaml.

Dependency looks like:

myLib
 |-- yaml version x
 +-- libA
    +-- yaml version y

I’m getting duplicate yaml symbols when linking myLib into an executable.

Is there any way to avoid this, other than forcing myLib to adopt yaml version y?

A few other pieces of information: myLib is built in CMake, so is yaml, but libA is built in scons.

Thanks!

2

Every symbol with exernal linkage needs to be unique. You cannot have two different versions of a function with the same name in one executable.
This would only work with header only libraries that do not create any such symbol.

But it should work If you create libA as shared library instead.

The other question is if you really want to have two different versions that potentially behave differently in the same executable.

3

This is a big reason why bundling is bad :slight_smile: . libA could alternatively mangle all of the libyaml symbols in its internal copy to avoid such things, but this is so rare and means that FetchContent doesn’t generally work (since the project needs patched), so it’s “never” done. If you do port it all to FetchContent, there is some mechanism to at least get all of them agreeing to use the same libyaml. Though you still have the issue if someone wants to consume myLib with their own libyaml (which may come in through otherLib) as well…