the sorry saga of the talloc soname 'fix'

[Jeremy Allison]

On Sat, Jul 04, 2009 at 11:48:36AM +1000, tridge at samba.org wrote:

> So yes, congratulations all round are in order. You've just overridden
> the talloc package maintainer by introducing real bugs, made us
> non-portable, introduced silent and difficult to track failures of
> applications, broken the ABI promises, lied to the distro package
> managers and loader and generally had a great time. But at least we
> haven't brought the good name of free software into disrepute by
> using up a precious .so number, so it was all worth it.

Tridge, I don't think this has overridden you as
the talloc library maintainer - this thing is your
baby and you make the technical decisions on how it works.
If you say the right technical bugfix is to require us to
break the ABI, we break the ABI and deal with it, no question.
But you must admit this fix didn't *require* us to break the
ABI. I'm sorry you feel overridden on this, I don't think
that was the intention of anyone.

Simo is representing Red Hat as the packaging maintainer
of the libraries they ship in a distro. If he says doing it
this way to maintain the ABI will cause less problems for them
and for users of the library, then I would believe him and
back him on this.

It's been a long time since I delt with the complexities of
the details of a runtime linker, so I'm not going to weigh into
any technical argument on this, as I'm sure I'll just get it
wrong :-).

But if Simo says this will cause less problems for a distro,
then I'd just trust him. It is after all his job to manage this
on behalf of Red Hat, and I think he does a really good job
at doing so. That's what my congratulations were for.

As Rodney King said, "Can't we all just get along ?" :-).

Can't do much more discussion of this today, as it's the
4th of July and I have a barbecue to prepare :-). Happy
4th, everyone (even for non-Americans :-).

Jeremy.