Shibboleth Developers

[Scott Cantor <>]

> FTR, my dev platform is RH7.3/gcc-3.0.4...  I'll let you know 
> if I have any problems...

I ran it down at about 4:00am last night. There's a bug in just about
every gcc that manifests on a lot of Linux versions, and causes
dynamic_casts to fail when you're casting an object from a shared
library, especially in another library that's been dlopen'd. mod_shib
gets the AttributeStatement in the getAttributes() call with one.

The bizarre thing is that it ought to be failing on shib1 and shib2, but
there's no question about the problem, gdb traces the fault right to the
dynamic_cast.

It's practically impossible to do something like SAML or really any
extendable XML vocabulary without casting down somewhere, so the issue
boils down to whether you do it as though you were programming in C or
older C++, where you have to basically implement your own private form
of RTTI. I thought I could save myself some hassle and just use
dynamic_cast, but I guess I was wrong. ;-(

Anyway, I can code around the bug in mod_shib and reissue a working copy
for now, just by using static_cast, but I'll have to actually build my
own RTTI into OpenSAML later unless they have this bug fixed in the main
gcc trunk.

-- Scott

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