[QUICK] talloc bugs

simo idra at samba.org
Wed Jul 1 12:37:22 GMT 2009


On Wed, 2009-07-01 at 21:59 +0930, Rusty Russell wrote:
> On Wed, 1 Jul 2009 09:50:46 pm Volker Lendecke wrote:
> > Ok, lets take talloc_free as an example. Your change makes
> > talloc_free as a symbol disappear from the .so. For a
> > published library this is just not possible, sorry.
> 
> For my own enlightenment, do samba internal interfaces commit to stable ABI?  
> I would have thought that even committing to a stable internal *API* would be 
> a massive burden?

It's been quite some time since we started stabilizing some APIs that
are needed by third party applications.

libtalloc and libtdb already have released tarballs, and libtevent will
soon follow, with the goal of releasing libldb as well.
Libsmbclient (and libwbcliwent ?) also present a stable ABI.

So, no, not all APIs or ABIs inside samba are changeable at will at this
point. That doesn't mean they are locked down, just that a change that
breaks the API contract or the ABI interface need to be evaluated and
agreed upon in advance and decisions need to be made on whether this
warrant creating a new set of libraries (basically a fork and rename of
symbols), or whether the extensions required can be done without
breaking existing code.

This stabilization is necessary because the code base has grown to a
point where we may need to start breaking samba into pieces (file
server(smbd), authentication server (winbindd), AD server (samba4
bits) ...), so it is not just for external applications, but also for
the benefit of the project itself.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce
Samba Team GPL Compliance Officer <simo at samba.org>
Principal Software Engineer at Red Hat, Inc. <simo at redhat.com>



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