[QUICK] talloc bugs

tridge at samba.org tridge at samba.org
Wed Jul 1 12:53:44 GMT 2009


Hi Simo,

 > 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.

That is the job of the shared library package maintainer, not us. I
know that you and Jelmer have been doing the work behind that library
maintainence, but that is not a reason to prevent ABI changes within
Samba.

We make changes that affect the ABI in the libraries used in Samba all
the time. To constrain ourselves to changes that do not change the ABI
would be a huge (and ever increasing!) burden. 

The person who packages the code into shared libs needs to change the
version number on that shared library when the ABI changes. That
packaging of the shared library (with versioning) is not done inside
the Samba git tree, and I very much hope it stays that way.

As regards to the API changes I made (disallowing some previously
ambiguous operations), that is a bug fix. Disallowing previously buggy
usage is quite normal between versions of libraries as far as I know,
just like bug fixing is normal between library versions.

The shared library package maintainer might decide to change the major
version as a result, and that would be a perfectly valid reaction, but
to say we can't change code inside Samba is far too constraining on
the project.

Cheers, Tridge


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