Comment 3 for bug 1763870

I can confirm that while this is "fixed" by updating to a newer release of Ubuntu (or Debian, as can be read in the Debian bug tracker), this problem is still present in Xenial.

The reason it is fixed in newer releases is that they ship OpenSSL >= 1.1.0 where upstream takes care of symbol versioning for the public symbols in the library.

Xenial uses OpenSSL 1.0.2, and the package maintainers have a custom script to tag known symbols in the library with a version number, and mask all the symbols not explicitly whitelisted in the script.

As reported more than 1 year ago, this script has not been properly maintained, so in Xenial, today, there are still symbols like `EVP_PKEY_asn1_set_item` that are exposed to application developers as part of the public API in the headers contained in the latest package version for libssl-dev, but that are not linkable because they have never been whitelisted by the package maintainers.

In Debian this is now considered Fixed, as the currently supported releases all ship OpenSSL >=1.1.0, but Ubuntu Xenial is supposed to be supported until April 2021.

What can I do to get some attention to this issue and fix the problem in Xenial?