Correcting Problems Reported by appcert

• Private Symbol Use. Because private symbols might change their behavior or disappear from one Solaris release to another, an application that depends on private symbols might not run on a Solaris release different from the one it was developed in. If appcert reports private symbol usage in your application, rewrite the application to avoid the use of private symbols.

• Demoted Symbols. Demoted symbols are functions or data variables in a Solaris library that have been removed or scoped locally in a later Solaris release. An application that directly calls such a symbol will fail to run on a release whose libraries do not export that symbol.

• Unbound Symbols. Unbound symbols are library symbols that are referenced by the application that the dynamic linker was unable to resolve when called by appcert. While unbound symbols are not always an indicator of poor binary stability, they might indicate a more serious problem, such as dependencies on demoted symbols.

• Obsolete Library. An obsolete library might be removed from Solaris in a future release. The appcert utility flags any use of such a library, because applications that depend on them will not function in a future release that does not feature the library. To avoid this problem, do not use interfaces from obsolete libraries.

• Use of sys_errlist or sys_nerr. The use of the sys_errlist and sys_nerr symbols might degrade binary stability, as a reference might be made past the end of the sys_errlist array. To avoid this risk, use strerror instead.

• Use of strong and weak symbols. The strong symbols that are associated with weak symbols are reserved as private because their behavior might change in future releases of Solaris. Applications should only directly reference weak symbols. An example of a strong symbol is _socket, which is associated with the weak symbol socket.